"Stop superkeys, clean up your supply chains!" This is the demand of an online petition, aimed at German health insurance companies. They let antibiotics be produced in India. By companies, which sometimes do not clear their wastewater of antibiotic remnants – thus triggering the growth of resistnant germs. Yet the health insurance companies don’t see themselves responsible.

In some southern European countries, doctors prescribe three times as many antibiotics as in Northern Europe. There is no medical explanation for these dramatic differences within the EU. However, high consumption levels can be highly dangerous: because where many antibiotics are taken, resistant germs are more frequent, as recent data from the EU authority on infectious diseases shows.

An official estimate of the massive number of deaths that will be caused each year by antimicrobial resistance – and cited widely by the UN and world leaders – is “unreliable” and “undermines” the fight against superbugs, a new scientific study has warned.

More than a quarter of hospitals in Germany were not meeting hygiene recommendations in 2014, according to new research by CORRECTIV and the ARD magazine "Plusminus". The Berlin Ministry of Health puts the responsibility on federal states and individual clinics. The board of the health insurance company BKK has criticised what it calls "serious deficits".

A new meta-analysis from a team of Cochrane scientists looked at 221 studies to assess the effectiveness and safety of interventions which try to improve how doctors prescribe antibiotics to in-patients. The analysis also identified ways of reducing unnecessary use of antibiotics in hospitals.