The new strains are part of a family of bacteria that includes E.coli, pictured above, C.diff and salmonella / AFP Source: AFP

Scientists in Britain have found a new gene that gives high levels of resistance to almost all antibiotics in intestinal bacteria that can cause pneumonia and urinary infections.

Professor Tim Walsh, from Cardiff University, said that the gene was rarely seen at all three years ago but is now commonly reported in hospitals in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Doctors said that the bugs have been identified in 37 British patients and that they were carried into the UK by people who had undergone surgery in India.

The bugs - NDM-1 (New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase) 1 positive bacteria - are part of Enterobacteriaceae, a family of bacteria that includes E.coli, C.diff and salmonella.

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Thorough hygiene - such as scouring hospital wards and frequent hand washing - reduces their spread.

Writing in the medical journal The Lancet, medics led by Professor Walsh said: "This multi-drug resistant bacteria and its worldwide spread could herald a period in which antibiotics become redundant."

There are only two antibiotics that work against NDM 1-producing bacteria, and the likelihood is that they will also be overcome before long.

"In many ways, this is it," Professor Walsh says. "This is potentially the end. There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against NDM 1-producing Enterobacteriaceae.

"We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years, where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothing to treat these infections with.

"It is the first time it has got to this stage with these type of bacteria."

Writing in the same issue of The Lancet, Johann Pitout, from the University of Calgary in Canada, says that patients who have received medical treatment in India should be screened before they are admitted for care back home.

He says that medical tourism, fuelling the spread, could grow in India by 30 per cent every year over the next five years.

Read more at The Sun.