LIFE-threatening bacterial infections are likely to become dramatically more common over the next 10 years as antibiotics lose their remaining effectiveness against man's age-old enemy.

A summit of infectious diseases experts has heard warnings that antibiotic-resistant superbugs are spreading quickly around the world, and for the first time in decades there is no new generation of more powerful drugs waiting in the wings that can stop them, The Australian reports.

Experts are calling on the Federal Government to formulate a national strategy to deal with the challenge. They say that, unless met, it could set the world back towards the medical experience of the 1930s - when operations and infections now considered routine often proved fatal because of unstoppable infections.

Tom Gottlieb, the president of the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases, said he and his colleagues were seeing patients with untreatable infections more often - yet there were no effective monitoring systems to track their location and frequency.

"This is an epidemic, just like you think of the flu as an epidemic," Dr Gottlieb said.

"It's a major public health problem and one that has really crept under the government's health radar."

Otto Cars, chairman of the International Action Network on Antibiotic Resistance, said the waning effectiveness of antibiotics would pose the biggest threat to cancer patients, transplant patients and others with depressed immune systems.

"I don't want to be a doomsday prophet, but we have to be realistic - in the next five to 10 years, the situation will be a lot worse."

Read more about the threat from antibiotic-resistant superbugs at The Australian