A "catastrophic" antibiotic threat to the population is now something governments must act on said Britain's top health official on Monday.

The chief medical officer Dame Sally Davies said "we will find ourselves in a health system not dissimilar to the early 19th century at some point." As a global effort is needed to fight antibiotic or antimicrobial resistance and fill a drug "discovery void" by researching and developing new medicines to treat emerging, mutating infections.

In the past few decades there have been only a handful of new antibiotics developed and put on the market while bacterial infections continue to evolve into "superbugs" resistant to existing bugs.

Nearly 5,000 patients nearly die each year in the UK of where the bacteria gets into the bloodstream and half the cases the bacteria is resistant to drugs.

"Antimicrobial resistance poses a catastrophic threat," said Davies. "If we don't act now, any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that can't be treated by antibiotics. And routine operations like hip replacements or organ transplants could be deadly because of the risk of infection.

"That's why governments and organizations across the world, including the World Health Organization and G8, need to take this seriously."

A professor at microbiology at Birmingham University and director of the campaign group Antibiotic Action, Laura Piddock welcomed Davies' efforts in raising awareness of the problem.

"There are an increasing number of infections for which there are virtually no therapeutic options, and we desperately need new discovery, research and development," she said.

Davies asking for politicians to treat the threat seriously as she seeks action across government departments, involving the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in particular due to the use of antibiotics in farming.

"Over the past two decades there has been a discovery void around antibiotics, meaning diseases have evolved faster than the drugs to treat them," she said.