An Australian infectious diseases expert agrees with Britain's top health official that resistance to antibiotics is as great a risk to public safety as terrorism.

Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer for England, says antimicrobial resistance poses a catastrophic threat, and routine operations could become deadly in just 20 years unless new antibiotic drugs are discovered.

Professor Peter Collignon from the Australian National University agrees the threat posed by antibiotics resistance is very real.

"It is just as important as terrorism and I actually think more important," he told the ABC.

"The reality is common things we take for granted - like bowel surgery, like treating people with leukaemia - if we don't have antibiotics that work we can no longer do those."

Dame Sally says new drugs are needed to stop the "ticking time bomb", as bacterial infections increasingly evolve into "superbugs" resistant to existing drugs.

Professor Collignon says that for a lot of people in the world, the "bomb has already exploded".

One of the best known superbugs, MRSA, is alone estimated to kill around 19,000 people every year in the United States - far more than HIV and AIDS - and a similar number in Europe.

And others are spreading.

Cases of totally drug resistant tuberculosis have appeared in recent years and a new wave of "super superbugs" with a mutation called NDM 1, which first emerged in India, has now turned up all over the world, from Britain to New Zealand.

Last year the World Health Organisation said untreatable superbug strains of gonorrhoea were spreading across the world.

Professor Collignon says tens of thousands of people die in Australia every year from bacterial infections and that number is rising.

But despite that, he says there are no new antibiotics on the horizon.

"There is just not the money for the pharmaceutical companies to make them like they were 30 or 40 years ago," he said.

Professor Collignon says an international approach is needed.

"We need major countries cooperating together to try and work out how we can give appropriate inducements to developers and companies to produce these drugs," he said.

ABC/Reuters