Superbugs capable of evading even the most powerful antibiotics are increasing their grip in Europe with rates of drug resistance in one type of bacteria reaching 50 percent in the worst-hit countries, health officials said Thursday. In a report on multi-drug resistant bacteria, or so-called superbugs, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), which monitors disease across the European Union, said the need to combat resistance was “critical”. “We need to declare a war - a war against these bacteria,” the ECDC's director Marc Sprenger said in an interview about the report. “If we don't ... we'll get lots of infections and many vulnerable patients will become severely ill, and we don't have the antibiotics to treat them.” Sprenger said that across the region, rates of resistance to last-line antibiotics by a bacteria called Klebsiella pneumoniae had more than doubled to 15 percent by 2010 from around seven percent five years ago. “What's even more worrying is that there's a great diversity among different countries in Europe - and some countries have resistance of almost 50 percent,” he said. K. pneumoniae is a common cause of pneumonia, urinary tract, and bloodstream infections in hospital patients. The superbug form is resistant even to a class of medicines called carbapenems, the most powerful known antibiotics, which are usually reserved by doctors as a last line of defense. The ECDC said several EU member states were now reporting that between 15 and up to 50 percent of K. pneumoniae from bloodstream infections were resistant to carbapenems.
