Antibiotic use should be re-regulated to help prevent a ''new plague'' of deadly multidrug-resistant superbugs, some of Australia's leading infectious disease experts have warned.
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Senior members of the Australasian Society of Infectious Diseases said a growing outbreak of antibiotic-resistant bacteria required similar planning to that undertaken for avian influenza.
David Looke, Thomas Gottlieb, Cheryl Jones and David Paterson described antibiotic, or antimicrobial, resistance as a looming public health crisis, social challenge and new plague.
They issued the warning to coincide with a major communicable diseases conference in Canberra this week.
''We need to be brave enough to make difficult decisions to re-regulate antibiotics,'' they wrote in the Medical Journal of Australia.
''Without intervention, many of the greatest advances in the practice of medicine such as transplantation, joint replacement surgery or critical care medicine - will be under significant threat.''
Associate Professor Looke, a Brisbane-based infectious diseases physician, said doctors were being increasingly forced to use ''last-resort'' antibiotics to fight infections.
''We're using the antibiotics of last resort. Ten years ago I'd never use those, but in our practice we're having to use them not infrequently now,'' he said.
''The problem is there are no new [antibiotics] coming up to replace those now. That's where the
problem is: we've always been one or two steps ahead of the bugs and that's not happening now.''
Dr Looke said there needed to be regular reviews of the prescribing and dosage rules for antibiotics. ''All the old antibiotics like penicillin and lots of them that came out in the 1960s and '70s are all licensed under rules that are now very old,'' he said.
''There's no authority in the system for a panel of experts to review them and update their usage. Maybe every five years every agent is reviewed by a panel.''
Dr Looke also called for a more closely co-ordinated approach to human, veterinary and agricultural use of antibiotics.
''The antimicrobials which were essential for humans would be quarantined for humans and the ones animals needed would be quarantined for animal use,'' he said.
New methods of disease treatments might have to be considered, such as interventional radiology and ''minimalist surgical techniques'' instead of traditional surgery.
''We're going to need more infection control, more attention to it, more research on vaccines and other lateral ways of doing things.''
Britain's chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies last week said growing antibiotic resistance was a critical risk to the UK, ranked alongside terrorism and climate change.
Dr Looke said Australia could have between 10 and 20 years to prepare before antibiotic resistance became a full-scale public health crisis.
