President Obama says he wants the amount of federal funding devoted to the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria almost doubled to combat the mounting problem blamed for an estimated 2 million infections and 23,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.
The White House has announced that the president will ask for the amount, $1.2 billion, as a portion of his annual budget request to be presented next week.
The increased funding could accelerate the development of new antibiotics, provide for better monitoring for the outbreak of "superbugs" and help prevent the increase of antibiotic-resistant microbes, the administration said in a release.
If the growth of antibiotic resistance continues at the current rate, infections presently considered routine and treatable could eventually become life-threatening, researchers and health agencies have warned.
"The rise of resistance could hamper our ability to perform a range of modern medical procedures from joint replacements to organ transplants, the safety of which depends on our ability to treat bacterial infections that can arise as post-surgical complications," the White House said in its statement.
Patients in hospitals and residents of nursing homes would be especially vulnerable to deadly infections, experts say.
"If we continue along the line of more and more microbes becoming antibiotic-resistant, we could be faced with a situation where we have untreatable infections," says Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health. "Talk about setting back the clock. That's bad news."
Around $650 million of the administration's funding request would be given to the NIH and other agencies for development of effective antibacterial drugs and diagnostic techniques, administration officials say.
More than $280 million would go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to advance efforts to reduce the overprescribing of antibiotics and improve tracking of outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant infections.
And $47 million would go to the Food and Drug Administration for evaluating new infection-fighting drugs and to monitor the use of antibiotics in livestock, which accounts for the majority of such drugs sold annually in the United States.
President Obama has called for stepped-up efforts to address the problem necessary "to better protect our children and grandchildren from the reemergence of diseases and infections that the world conquered decades ago."
The White House's budget request follows a 5-year plan announced in September with the goal of slowing the spread of drug-resistant bacteria.
It has set up a task force that will deliver a full plan of action by February 15.
