Brendan Smith praised sepsis advocates Sinead and Professor Kerrigan and called for urgent government attention to sepsis and antimicrobial failure. He proposed sending their submissions to the Minister for Health and the Health Committee and backing a request to place sepsis on the country's EU presidency work agenda.
Praise for advocacy
Brendan Smith complimented Sinead and North East Sepsis Awareness for raising public understanding of sepsis, noting the personal difficulty of speaking about a young relative's death and the dignity of her advocacy. He emphasised that public awareness of sepsis is relatively recent and thanked local and national efforts to educate communities.
Acknowledgement of clinical evidence
Brendan Smith thanked Professor Kerrigan for clearly outlining the clinical challenges and the "uncomfortable truths" about patients who do not respond to available treatments. He described the failure of some treatments as "frightening" and highlighted the need for clearer medical communication to the public and policymakers.
Request to ministers and committee
Brendan Smith offered to send the witnesses' opening contributions in full to the Minister for Health and to the Health Committee. He said the committee should formally support the request to place sepsis on the EU work agenda during the country’s presidency to raise the issue at a European level.
EU presidency as a strategic opportunity
Brendan Smith argued that the EU presidency, which occurs only infrequently for a small member state, provides an important platform to elevate sepsis and antimicrobial resistance across Europe. He acknowledged that administrative change can take months but said getting the issue onto the agenda is a vital starting point.
Concerns about antibiotic development
Professor Kerrigan warned that antibiotics and antimicrobials are failing worldwide and that many large pharmaceutical companies are not developing new antibiotics because resistance develops too quickly. He said an "antimicrobial void" exists and that alternative approaches are being explored to avoid a return to a pre-penicillin era.
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Thank you very much Cahirley and I welcome our guests who have just given us two powerful statements and there's a lot to be considered in both of your statements. Sinead, I want to compliment you in particular. It has to be extremely difficult to go to public fora and outline what happened to your lovely sister now, such a young lady. I have heard you before in this house. I've listened to you on our local radio stations and also read interviews and read about your advocacy work in the local media, in Cavan Monaghan as well, and nationally. And Sinead, I take the opportunity again to compliment you and your colleagues at North East Sepsis Awareness on what you have done to bring a greater awareness to this particular difficult issue. It's not that many years ago that we as lay people would not have heard of the word sepsis. It's not that many years ago. I know you as healthcare professionals would be in a different league to us in understanding it. But again, Sinead, you have been so balanced in what you outlined there. Your sister-in-law, having come to live in Ireland, moved into a new home, started a young family. It has to be extremely difficult. And again, you're doing a great public service and a great public good in being able, with such dignity and with such clarity, to outline what happened and what could have been avoided as well, unfortunately. And I pass on my compliments as well to your colleagues who have done so much good work nationally, not just at local level, in creating the awareness. Could I also thank Professor Kerrigan for outlining in very clear terms the challenges and the difficulties there are facing us. You've done that with great clarity for us who don't have the medical and nursing knowledge outlining the very serious challenges. And I think there are, you used the phrase, the uncomfortable truth. Well, there are very many uncomfortable truths there. And about the fact that people are not responding to treatment, even though they're being administered the drugs that are available in that, that's fairly frightening. And maybe again, internationally, and as the drug companies internationally, is there anything like the effort that was made during COVID to develop vaccines, to develop medication with urgency, where both governments worldwide and drug companies work together and invested big time to get vaccines when we're going through the COVID pandemic. Is anything, in any type of scale, is anything of that happening to try and address this particular scourge and this very, very serious illness? Could I say that, with your permission, at Kerrigan, I'd be delighted to propose that we send the correspondence today, in totality, your opening contributions, to the Minister for Health and to the Health Committee as well, and that we formally support your request that the government put this particular issue on their EU work agenda for the presidency of the European Union. And again, you make the valid point, we have a very important forum available to us as a small member state of the European Union that only comes around every 13 and a half years, literally. It's an opportunity. Now, we all know that, unfortunately, in public administration, a lot doesn't happen over a few months, but if we get it on the agenda, get the focus on us, that's a very, very important starting point as well. And if we were able to convince the Minister for Health, the government, and the people that decide on the EU work agenda for our country, if we could do that, then we would be bringing newer work and the awareness that you are creating and the importance that both Sinead and Professor Kerrigan have attached to it, to a new level as well, which is needed if we're to deal with this particular difficulty, this very serious illness, not just on a national point of view, but as you pointed out, this isn't just a problem confronting our country, it's confronting Europe and worldwide, globally. So, a sincere thanks for the great work you do, and I'm sure every one of us here as a committee and as members of the Dáil and Sinead would be glad to continue to support you in what you have outlined in a very cogent, clear manner and a realistic way of going about trying to address this issue. Thank you. Thanks, Deputy Smith. Professor Kerrigan, would you like to address the question in relation to the drugs and availability thereof? Go on, please. Sure. This is part of the problem that we have in this area right now. I think it's really worth pointing out at this stage that sepsis is curable. It's not the big killer. It's only a killer if treatment is delayed. Exactly. If you're caught, if sepsis is caught in time, it can absolutely treat sepsis and can prevent the subsequent organ failure and death that associates with it. Part of the problem is getting that treatment. And we are in an awkward situation right now where the antibiotics or the antimicrobials that we use to treat sepsis are failing. That's failing all across the world. Drug companies are not developing new antibiotics and part of the reason for this is because the microorganisms that are being treated with these antibiotics or antimicrobials have learned how to overcome the drug. And as a result, many of the large pharma are not developing new antibiotics because they've become resistant too quickly. And as a result, it wouldn't be an investment or a return for them. So unfortunately, there's an antimicrobial void in the world right now where we're not mass producing or there's not enough money going into research to find new ways to treat sepsis. Now, there are other opportunities that exist right now in terms of not relying solely on antimicrobials because they're failing and there are other opportunities that are being looked at right now and they are being progressed. But it's an unfortunate state that we're in right now that we could end up in a pre-penicillin era where infection was a big problem for us. Thank you very much. So there's a danger of us actually going back instead of going forward with all the technology and know-how and so-called sophistication that we have in the world today. I'm speaking as an A-person. Is there any other area such as sepsis where there's an antimicrobial void as well? Would it be the main illness where there's that particular void at the present time? Yeah, so the biggest concern we have right now is sepsis because sepsis strikes so quickly. A person who has an uncontrolled septic response can die in a short period as 12 to 24 hours if they don't receive treatment. In terms of other infections that can be contained in the body, that might be different. But sepsis is where the whole body is infected. So the infection spreads all over the body. It's different to like you would have a lung infection where the infection will be contained to the lungs. In sepsis, it travels all over the body and all the major organs become infected and begin to fail at the same time. So the concern we have is actually sepsis. Sepsis would be the most serious of all the infections it can get. Thank you, Professor Kerrigan. And again, we used to hear in the past, I'm talking again of us as lay people, we used to hear about MRSA and there was some other particular infection that superseded, if that's the right word, MRSA. As lay people, we don't hear much about that particular infection nowadays, do we? Well, MRSA is still absolutely a problem. Part of the reason you may not hear about MRSA specifically is because there are so many, so MRSA is methicillin, resistant Staph aureus and Staph aureus is the bacteria. The reason you may not hear as much about that anymore is because there are so many other bacteria that are now resistant to antibiotics that when you would have heard about MRSA 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, it was because that was the one that was the major threat. but it's not anymore. It's still a threat but there's so many other threats right now because so many other species of bacteria have become resistant to the only drugs that we have left to treat them. This is probably an unfair question. Are antibiotics being administered too freely for lesser illnesses? That's a complex question because there's a lot of reasons why we would see antibiotic resistance right now. It's not just that they're being used too much. There's numerous reasons why antibiotics are in this position right now. Thank you, Kerry. And again, I thank very sincerely Sinead and Professor Kerrigan for their outstanding contributions and the great work you're doing. Thank you, Deputy Smith.
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