Medicines Act 1968

Now’s time to declare war on antibiotic resistance

A month before allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944, Time magazine featured Dr. Alexander Fleming on its cover. The photo caption read: "His penicillin will save more lives than war can spend."

I have been a pediatrician for nearly 40 years, and I can attest that penicillin and other antibiotics have kept the promise Time boldly made amid a world war.

Unfortunately, I am equally aware that these drugs are rapidly losing their effectiveness, that children are still suffering from deadly infections as a result, and that we are running out of new antibiotics to treat them.

In response to these trends, the World Health Organization has dedicated today — World Health Day - to fighting the spread of antibiotic resistance. We must take this opportunity to acknowledge that we need new antibiotics and we need them now.

Fleming's discovery of penicillin heralded the dawn of the antibiotic era. Once-incurable infections were easily healed. Bacteria, however, have been adapting and evolving for eons - and for the last several decades, they have grown increasingly resistant to the antibiotics we invented to kill them.

We kept pace with antibiotic resistance for 33 years. The period between 1935 and 1968 was a golden age that saw the introduction of 13 novel classes of the drugs, each of which attacked bacteria in unique ways.

But all of a sudden, the pipeline of new antibiotics went dry. No new antibiotic classes were introduced between 1969 and 2000, and only two have been introduced since.

As a result, we do not have enough new medicines to fight drug-resistant superbugs and unless we do something to change that, we will find ourselves returning to a world without antibiotics. Infections and medical procedures considered innocuous today will become as dangerous as they were before Fleming's miraculous discovery.

Children are increasingly being infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, commonly known as MRSA. This drug-resistant bug kills 19,000 Americans each year, and a growing number of infections are being acquired outside of hospitals. At Texas Children's Hospital, about 70 percent of the Staphylococcus aureus isolates from children who developed their infections in the community are MRSA.

Section 12(1) of the Medicines Act 1968 « The Herbarium

The disagreement between herbalists who want to be recognised by the state and those who don’t want to be organised is as old as the hills. Those of you who have willed for statutory regulation (SR) are on the eve of achieving your dream, and we hope you will make the very best you are able of the trials and the opportunities it will present. However, there is one last bit of business to attend to, which might even unite us briefly, in countering the proposal to reform Section 12(1) of the Medicines Act 1968. We hope you will take up this cause as it profoundly affects the future and security of those choosing to work in a regulated environment, as well as the rest of us.

Firstly, here is Section 12(1) itself:

Section