In January last year, it caused the Health Protection Agency to issue a National Resistance Alert. The focus was on a type of enzyme, carbapenemase, that destroys the antibiotic and makes the bacteria resistant. The Antibiotic Resistance Monitoring and Reference Laboratory in London had seen only eight bacterial samples producing such an enzyme in the years up to 2007. But there were 21 in 2008 and more than 40 in 2009.

The rise in the number of cases infected with these resistant bacteria was not the only development. It was not due to a single kind of bacterium carrying a single type of enzyme – resistance in different species of bacteria was appearing, due to different enzymes. And they were being imported into the UK as on-going infections in people who had been patients in hospitals in Greece, Turkey and Israel.

The most recent development, and the one that has hit the news this week, is that resistant bacteria producing a brand new carbapenemase, NDM-1, have been found in Britain and that some of them have come here from the Indian subcontinent. Some of the implications of the discovery are truly alarming.

The story started in 2008 with a 59-year-old man who had […]