Farm groups forming the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics have this week urged the Prime Minister to make a delayed announcement on antimicrobial resistance. Although PM David Cameron promised the House of Commons during Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday 7th May 2014, nearly a month later there has been no follow up, despite sobering warnings of rapidly evolving bacterial resistance to essential drugs by medical experts in the intervening weeks.

In a reply to a question from Zac Goldsmith MP last month, Mr Cameron acknowledged that the problem of antibiotic resistance could have "unbelievably bad consequences" leading to quite minor ailments not being properly treatable by antibiotics. The Alliance is urging the government to take urgent action to reduce antibiotic use in both medicine and farming.

The World Health Assembly (WHA), which met last week, highlighted the issue of antibiotic resistance; attendees at the Assembly confirmed that entering a catastrophic post-antibiotic age - in which minor, common infections could again become killers - is a real possibility unless urgent action is taken.

At the WHA conference on 20^th May the Netherlands’ Minister of Health, Edith Schippers said "People are getting seriously ill and are dying as a result of skin infections and diarrhoea. Common surgeries like knee replacement will become potential killers because of secondary infections that are untreatable. This is a global problem on a par with, if not more serious than, nuclear security, international terrorism and climate change."

The Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics has welcomed the leadership being shown on the issue by the UK's Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, who has made the issue a personal priority and clashed with veterinary industry leaders earlier this year over antimicrobial resistance. Speaking to BBC Radio 4 on Monday, Professor Dame Davies echoed warnings made last week by Edinburgh University's Professor Mark Woodhouse that the threat to humans from antibiotic resistance is equal to that posed by climate change. Building on Professor Woodhouse's warning, the CMO said "Sadly, [antibiotic resistance] is likely to get us first."

Is intensive animal agriculture growing threat of resistance?

In a letter to David Cameron on 13th May 2014, the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics stated its belief that intensive animal agriculture could be playing a part in the threat of resistance. The Alliance said "It simply does not make sense to be feeding nearly half of all the antibiotics used in this country to farm animals, just so that they can be kept in high numbers indoors, often in conditions which carry with them the risk of high levels of disease."

Use of antibiotics in UK farming increased by 18 percent between 2000 and 2010, and sales of type of drug, fluoroquinolones, have risen by 70 percent since 2000. Although industry groups claim there is no conclusive evidence that farm animals are a significant source of human infection with resistant bacteria, Cambridge University researchers discovered a new form of multi-drug resistant MRSA (ST398) in UK livestock in 2012, which they concluded is "readily able to transfer to humans."