Fighting infections with a cup of tea hardly sounds evidence-based, but here at HealthWatch we were interested to learn that our friends at Antibiotic Research UK (ANTRUK), a charity founded in 2014 to develop new antibiotic therapies to fight superbugs, are doing just that. Their Great British Tea Parties will be held all over the UK in the afternoon of Wednesday 18th November, European Antibiotic Awareness Day.

The event will raise funds for their research programme and generate awareness of the worldwide phenomenon of antibiotic resistance and its implications for humanity. ANTRUK hope it will become an annual event. Superbugs are a growing problem in hospitals and the community as bacteria become more and more resistant to our existing antibiotics. In future, medical procedures currently taken for granted, for example cancer treatment, open heart surgery, hip and knee replacement and organ transplantation will become much more perilous if new effective antibiotics are not available. But many big pharmaceutical companies have withdrawn from antibiotic development.

The charity hopes to raise £250,000 to fund their first research programme to tackle superbugs. With some of the UK’s top antibiotic resistance researchers and scientists on board, they aim to develop their first new antibiotic therapy by the early 2020s.

Find out more, or to host your own tea party for ANTRUK, go to www.antibioticresearch.org.uk