New UK and Europe-wide initiatives to combat antibiotic resistance
launched
Also in this issue …
This issue of Hospital Pharmacist also contains:
A comment about the antimicrobial
pharmacy initiative (p106)
An article about
a web-based pharmacy to microbiology referral system (p131-2)
PDF (50K)
A paper about using defined daily doses to study
the use of antibacterials (p133-6)
PDF (150K) |
Two new initiatives to combat and report antibiotic resistance were launched in March.
One of these is a new website, set up by the British Society for Antimicrobial
Chemotherapy (BSAC) to give detailed information about antibiotic resistance
across the UK and Ireland. It presents information from two ongoing studies — one
covering bacteraemia and the other community-acquired lower respiratory
infection.
A variety of organisms are included, not just methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus
aureus and Escherichia coli, as is in-depth resistance information, such
as the distribution of minimum inhibitory concentrations for each antibiotic
with each species in each year. This means that users can, for example,
find not only the proportion of Staphylococcus aureus in blood samples
that are resistant to oxacillin (now used instead of methicillin), but
also how likely those organisms are to be resistant to other antibiotics,
such as vancomycin or ciprofloxacin. Recently-licensed antibiotics, and
some products still in development, are included. The website is available
at www.bsacsurv.org
The second initiative is a new scientific network, GRACE (genomics to
combat resistance against antibiotics in community-acquired lower respiratory
tract infection in Europe), which is funded under the European Union’s
research framework programme. The network will bring together 17 academic
groups from nine EU member states to share their work and develop better
diagnostic tools, so that antibiotic use in the community can be improved.
Among other benefits, it is hoped that this will reduce hospital admissions
for respiratory illnesses, such as acute exacerbations of chronic obstructive
pulmonary disease.
GRACE is co-ordinated by Herman Goossens, professor of microbiology at
the universities of Antwerp, Belgium and Leiden in the Netherlands and
involves researchers based at the universities of Nottingham, East Anglia,
Birmingham, Cardiff, Southampton, Oxford and Imperial College, London.
Further
information is available at www.grace-lrti.org |
Hospital Pharmacist