Bacterial resistance to drugs increasing

Press, 21 February 1987, Page 7

Bacterial resistance to drugs increasing

NZPA-Reuter Chicago

Bacteria and other pests are growing increasingly resistant to treatment, threatening dramatic increases in the costs of medicines and pesticides, scientists says. Richard Roush, an assistant professor of entomology at Cornell University in New York state, said misuse of antibiotic drugs in Third World countries and the ease of international travel had helped spread resistant strains of bacteria. “We have been having people die from drug resistance. That’s clear,” said Dr Roush, who presided over a discussion on

the topic at a meeting ,of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"But the real problem is that it is going to dramatically increase the cost of antibiotics, to the order of several fold.” He said the same applied to pesticides. “There are instances where people have lost crops or cropping systems. But the worst problem is probably that it’s dramatically increasing the cost of insecticides.” Scientists have blamed the misuse of antibiotics and the use of small amounts of many common drugs in animal feed for

the development of strains of bacteria that resist such drugs as penicillin and tetracycline. Stuart Levy, a professor of medicine at Tufts University, in Boston, told the meeting that resistant organisms could easily cross borders. “It’s got to be taken as a world issue,” he said.

John Barrett, a lecturer in genetics at Cambridge University, in England, told the session that there was promise in the use of different planting methods — such as putting several varieties of the same crop together in a field to combat plant pests.