The NHS may soon be unable to safely offer caesareans and hip operations because of soaring levels of antibiotic resistance in British hospitals, the chief medical officer for England is warning.

Professor Dame Sally Davies’s comments come as the Department of Health pledged £30m to fund the fight against deadly superbugs through investment in cutting-edge drugs and diagnostics.

Contrasting the prime minister’s vision earlier this week of a health service made more effective through the use of artificial intelligence (AI), Dame Sally painted a picture of another possible future – “much harder to confront” – in which antibiotic resistance pushed medical science and the NHS backwards.

“It is a future in which common infections and minor injuries kill once again, and where the types of intervention we routinely deliver today, such as caesarean sections, chemotherapy and hip replacements, become extremely dangerous”, she writes in the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday.