The next longitude
Posted: Wed Jun 25, 2014 8:50 pm
Antibiotic resistance has been selected as the focus for a £10m prize set up to tackle a major challenge of our time.
Six themes were initially identified by organisers of the Longitude Prize; these were then put to a public vote.
The winning theme was announced on the BBC's One Show, broadcast on Wednesday evening.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned of a "post-antibiotic era" where key drugs no longer work and people die from previously treatable infections.
The competition is based on the 1714 Longitude Prize won by John Harrison.
Harrison's clock allowed sailors to pinpoint their position at sea for the first time.
Speaking on the One Show, BBC science presenter Alice Roberts said: "There were some amazing challenges, but this is such an important one facing us at the moment.
"From here, the Longitude Committee will reconvene and they will tighten up exactly what the challenge is going to be. We know it's going to be something about how we tackle antibiotic resistance; it could be a new way of diagnosing a bacterial infection versus a viral infection.
"They want to narrow down that challenge so we'll really know when someone has won it."
Dr Jeremy Farrar, director of medical research charity the Wellcome Trust, said he was "delighted" by the result.
"Antibiotics, and indeed the multitude of drugs used daily to treat infection, are the bedrock on which much of modern medicine is built.
"Yet rapidly emerging drug resistance threatens the medical successes - from transplant surgery to cancer treatment - we currently take for granted. It is crucial we focus our collective global research efforts on this, one of the greatest public health threats of our time."
http://www.longitudeprize.org/
Great to see an incentive offered to address the problem of antibiotic resistance; I saw a Frontline documentary on the subject this past winter that I found terrifying - one story involved a child whose scraped knee from a tumble at the playground resulted in a deadly course of infection leading to a heart transplant, all because of the reduced effectiveness of antibiotics. It's a problem too many folks are clueless about, and which many contribute to by the overuse of the drugs.