At the PMQs in the House of Commons today, January 15, Danny Chambers MP asked what Sir Keir Starmer and his government are doing to help Ukrainian medics return their soldiers to the front line in the face of new and highly resilient bacteria, which could arrive in the UK soon.
Mr Chambers said: “Mr Speaker, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to the emergence of bacteria that are severely resistant to multiple antibodies and this is now seriously delaying the return of injured soldiers to the front line.
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“But just like Mr Putin, we know that these superbugs do not respect national borders and it is only a matter of time before we start to detect them in our NHS hospitals and we know that antimicrobial resistance is a huge challenge facing us at the moment.”
He asked: “Will the prime minister consider supporting the Ukrainian war effort by providing rapid diagnostic tests which can be used in the field and in civilian hospitals which would not only enable us to diagnose and treat these resistant infections more quickly, returning soldiers back to the front line more quickly, but would also provide valuable surveillance data to help global public health and protect our NHS from these dangerous bacteria?”
Prime minister Keir Starmer replied: “I thank him for raising this and he knows our support for Ukraine is iron-clad.
“Mr Speaker, we are funding NHS doctors and nurses to work closely with their Ukrainian counterparts to share best practice including how to prevent the spread of infections and AMR. Through the World Health Organisation, we’re also strengthening Ukraine’s health system to provide better care and will continue to do so.”
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Last month, scientists sounded a warning about the alarming rise of “extremely pathogenic” multi-drug resistant bacteria in war-torn Ukraine.
Researchers tested samples from 150 war-wounded people and found several types of bacteria resistant to broad-spectrum antibiotics, with six per cent resistant to all tested antibiotics.
They narrowed in on samples of the bacterium Klebsiella pneumoniae to assess if it had the ability to cause disease in a wider context.
Klebsiella causes a range of diseases like pneumonia and infections of the urinary tract, skin and wounds, and is responsible for about a fifth of all deaths attributed to drug-resistant superbugs.