Test before treatment

Reading: Ara Darzi on why antibiotic resistance could be deadlier than cancer, The Economist, 23 September 2024.

Antibiotics cost pennies, tests costs tens of pounds, and now we find ourselves here:

Today untreatable infections, for which there is no antibiotic, cause more than 1m deaths a year worldwide, a toll projected to rise ten-fold by 2050, surpassing all deaths from cancer.

This needs to change:

New, effective antibiotics are, of course, crucial. But innovative research will be futile unless accompanied by wide-scale changes in behaviour. Crucially, we must learn to wisely use the antibiotics we already have.

So far, usual story, but there is a twist here. Lord Darzi is calling for a commitment to test before treatment: “by 2030 no antibiotic should be prescribed without a proper diagnosis that identifies the underlying cause as bacterial infection.”

Imagine that we had a covid-like test that could be self-administered and swiftly tell patients and clinicians what they were treating? It would be transformative.