Call for biocide screening protocols

The European Union (EU) should develop comprehensive screening protocols for biocides and biocidal products to ensure they do not contribute to the growth in antibiotic resistance amongst bacteria, senior scientists have advised.

The EU's scientific committee on emerging and newly identified health risks - a key advisory body to the European Commission - has raised concerns about both the lack of knowledge about how biocides promote antibiotic resistance and a failure of regulators to take active steps to prevent this health threat.

"There are currently no accepted standard protocols for the evaluation of antimicrobial resistance induced or selected by biocide," it said in a report. "Such standards must be developed to provide informative data for biocidal product development and usage, and for regulatory bodies."

As a result, it "strongly recommends..the development of standard protocol(s) for the quantitative assessment of biocide induced resistance and cross-resistance". These tests should combine repeated biocide exposures to bacteria "with existing standardised antibiotics susceptibility tests."