Trauma surgeons have warned that Britain’s knife crime “epidemic” is putting the National Health Service (NHS) under strain, as figures revealed the number of incidents reached a record high of more than 40,000 last year.

The Daily Telegraph reported the 40,147 knife offences recorded in England and Wales — the highest figure since records began in 2011 — marked a 57 per cent increase from the figure for 2014.

Knife crime has risen for four consecutive years since 2014, when then Home Secretary Theresa May curbed the use of stop and search — a policing tactic officers insist saves lives but which is branded “racist” by campaigns that globalist financier George Soros’s international grantmaking organisation Open Society Foundations has bragged about funding.

England: Schoolchildren Given Lessons on ‘Living Knife-Free’ as Youth Violence Soars https://t.co/U1CzDJ2X9w — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) July 17, 2018

The powers were used 600,000 times in 2014 when Mrs May brought in the reforms. Claiming their overuse was an affront to law-abiding black youths. The figures saw a massive decline as a result, with stop and search used just 160,000 times in 2015/16.

Former Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Superintendent Kevin Hurley argued in 2016 that rather than unfairly targetting black youths — who are more likely to be both perpetrators as well as victims of stabbings — stop and search was saving black lives.

Earlier this year, Britain’s most senior police chief, the liberal Cressida Dick, asserted that the tactic is a vital tool in preventing knife attacks but admitted that officers are now frightened to stop and search young people for fear of being accused of racism.

English cities bore the brunt of this, with the number of incidents jumping 22 percent in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s London from 2016/17 to 2017/18, with the additional 2,643 offences seen in the capital accounting for more than half the total rise nationally.

At the Royal Society of Medicine’s Spotlight on Knife Crime conference last week, doctors, police officers, and academics heard how youth violence was an “epidemic” which has “increased massively” in urban areas across the UK.

President Trump Highlights Deadly Knife Crime Epidemic in Khan’s London: ‘It’s Like a War Zone’ https://t.co/nuwlP1HVK1 — Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) May 5, 2018

“It’s across our urban centres, not just London. It’s a disease we need to work closely together to try to control as best we can,” said Adam Brooks, a consultant surgeon based in Nottingham, where the audience heard his major trauma centre had treated as many young knife crime victims aged 15-25 in the past five months as it had in the whole of 2017.

“Unfortunately penetrating violence is not a London phenomenon … This is something we’re all seeing, in all the urban trauma centres,” he said, adding that the violence is putting strain on Britain’s public healthcare service, reported The Times.

“These guys are in our hospitals for a long time,” he said, highlighting the resource use resulting from just one patient being hospitalised for four and a half months, and his requiring 19 visits to theatre for surgery.

Presenting figures which showed the huge quantity of blood needed for transfusions, Brooks used his presentation to warn that, if NHS Blood and Transplant “[fails to] collect enough O negative blood donations in the coming weeks, stocks may fall below two days”.