THE picture painted by the UK’s chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies on Thursday of our world following a ‘post antibiotic apocalypse’ was a truly frightening one.

Dame Sally warned that unless we tackled the growing threat of antibiotic resistance now, it could spell the end of modern medicine as we know it.

Without the drugs used to fight infections, common medical interventions like caesarean sections and cancer treatments would become very risky, she said. Antibiotic resistant infections are predicted to lead to 10 million deaths a year globally by 2050, at a cost to the world economy of $100 trillion. “We really are facing, if we don’t take action now, a dreadful post-antibiotic apocalypse,” Dame Sally said.

Frightening as they are, such warnings are not new. York scientist Professor Colin Garner, who headed up a cancer research laboratory in the city for almost 20 years, has long been warning of just such an ‘apocalypse’.

Prof Garner helped set up a national charity three years ago - Antibiotic Research UK, or ANTRUK - which is dedicated to finding better ways of using the antibiotics we have. It is looking at ways of using existing antibiotics in combination with other drugs, in the hope this will make them more effective against resistant bacteria.

But Prof Garner is the first to admit that we really need completely new antibiotics. The problem is that pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to develop them because they are not profitable.

ANTRUK wants to see the creation of a £100million UK Antibiotic Discovery Fund, and a system of reimbursing pharma companies. Today, Prof Garner called for a ‘grand alliance’ of government, the pharma industry and health charities.

We hope somebody listens, and soon. Because unless they do, we really are sleepwalking towards disaster.