38 November/December 2020
eective.
Because of that, WHO says health
professionals should only prescribe
antibiotics when necessary and
patients should make sure not to
share or use leftover antibiotics. 
New treatments are needed, but
they are hard to come by, Dr Burke
says. Antibiotics take years to
develop, cost billions, and are only
taken for a few days by most patients
and so are not lucrative. Drus for
chronic diseases such as diabetes
are taken daily for years, and so are
far more profitable.
The incentive to develop new
antibiotics is also reduced by bacterial
resistance – since Bi Pharma cannot sell a
dru that no loner works. One of the most
promisin avenues, Dr Burke oes on, is the
use of phaes - viruses that naturally infect and
kill bacteria.
Colin Hill, Professor in the School of
Microbioloy at University Collee Cork, is a
leadin researcher in the field: “Phaes are the
most abundant bioloical entities on the
planet”, he says. There’s about ten quintillion
D
OCTORS GLOBALLY
worry daily about
fihtin Covid-.
However, some doctors
and medical experts now
worry not just about the damae the
virus can cause, but about the
medical battles that will follow in its
wake.
Under uidelines produced in
April by the Health Service
Executive’s Antimicrobial
Resistance and Infection Team,
antibiotics are to be iven to Covid-
 in-patients with symptoms of
bronchitis or pneumonia, or who
produce coloured sputum when they couh.
The uidelines also stated that “frail elderly
patients” are at reater risk of death from
infections and, so may need to be prescribed
with antibiotics far earlier than doctors miht
otherwise do with patients of that ae.
While often necessary to save lives, the lon-
term result of a rowth in the already hih use
of antibiotics worries some healthcare
professionals, includin Dr Liam Burke, a
bacterioloy lecturer and researcher at the
Centre for One Health at NUI Galway.
“With Covid, the whole world is usin tons of
antibiotics to protect people from secondary
bacterial infections”, Dr Burke says. “That’s
oin to have a hue knock-on eect on the
levels of antibiotic resistant bacteria after this
is all over”.
“There’s a lot of antibiotic resistance in
Ireland, enerally, includin in some of those
bacteria that live in our nose or our throat and
Accelerating the
three-billion-year-old dance
of phages with bacteria
by Shane Raymond
As Covid-19 and other diseases spawn resistance to over-used
antibiotics, phages - viruses that naturally infect and kill bacteria –
may be a long-term replacement
a doctor in ten years time might be able to
take a swab from an infected site, put it into
a machine and wait an hour. An algorithm
will look at the genomes and say: ‘use phage
number 17’.
normally don’t cause any problems at all. But,
when our immune system is down they can
cause an infection. The more antibiotics we
use, the more bacteria et resistant”, he
considers.
The World Health Oranisation (WHO) has
stated that antibiotic resistance is “one of the
biest threats” today, warnin that a host of
infections includin pneumonia, tuberculosis,
food poisonin and onorrhoea are becomin
harder to treat as antibiotics become less
Irish Reserch
POLITICS