It’s the $40 billion drug market that no company wants a part of. As resistance to antibiotics allows long-treatable diseases to once again become killers, pharmaceutical companies are sacking their antibiotic researchers. Keri Phillips reports.

Some of the most common infectious diseases are caused by bacteria. They range from minor skin infections to meningitis, TB and pneumonia.

Before the advent of antibiotics, about one in three Australians died before the age of 30. People routinely died of pneumonia. A skin infection could lead to the amputation of a limb or even death. More people died from bacterial infection than anything else on the planet.

Penicillin, the quintessential antibiotic, was discovered in 1926, and the golden age of antibiotic development followed the end of the Second World War. Dozens of antibiotics were discovered every year from the ’50s through to the ’70s, and they changed medicine. Common procedures like open-heart surgery, chemotherapy for cancer patients with depressed immune systems, organ transplants, even hip replacements would not be possible without antibiotics.

Professor Matt Cooper, director of the IMB Centre for Superbug Solutions at the University of Queensland, says that although many of the initial serendipitous discoveries were at universities, the vast majority of the compounds came from pharmaceutical companies.

‘We all know Pfizer, which famously developed Viagra and Lipitor—blockbuster drugs. But actually Pfizer was an antibiotic company for the first 30 years of its existence,’ he says.

‘There were 30 or 40 pharmaceutical companies around then that were actively involved in developing these drugs, because they were quite valued by society and they were used a lot. They really did save millions and millions of lives.’

Antibiotics in agriculture and unintended consequences

In the ’50s, the agriculture industry started to use antibiotics on livestock.

‘Farmers and people with chickens, eggs, beef, seafood, realised they could get far more productive output from growing animals, particularly when you start to put lots of animals in a closed space,’ says Cooper.

‘It makes perfect sense, if you put lots of people in a crowded bus in winter you’re more likely to get a cold. If you put lots of fish in the water close together in intensive agriculture, they are more likely to get infection. We started to use antibiotics in agriculture quite aggressively very soon after we started using it in man.’

Farmers also discovered that if you give antibiotics to a food stock animal every day, in general the yields are much higher—you will get a slightly heavier chicken or a slightly bigger fish.

Professor John Turnidge, who led an Australian government inquiry into the use of antibiotics in food-producing animals in the late ’90s, says that the overuse of antibiotics—so-called growth promoters in agriculture—has had unintended consequences.

‘They didn’t quite recognise that using antibiotics in low doses over a long period of time is the most perfect storm for driving antibiotic resistance,’ he says.

‘Over a long time, in at least a good chunk of my working life, the industries involved have tried to deny that there was any link between that use and use in humans. They forgot a fundamental piece of biology—bacteria are everywhere, they’re everywhere, and we all swim in the same gene pool.

‘Genes will go from anywhere to anywhere, provided the bacteria move and have contact. So we can’t isolate ourselves any more than the animals can isolate themselves from us.’