Bacterial infections that do not respond to treatment are a major cause of death worldwide.
According to new estimates, bacterial antimicrobial resistance caused 4.95 million deaths in 2019, making it the third leading cause of death globally.
Bacteria-killing drugs are unquestionably one of humanity's greatest discoveries. We no longer have to worry about death from rose bush scratches or gonorrhea since Alexander Fleming identified antibacterial activity in the fungus Penicillium in 1928. Antibiotics have saved millions upon millions of lives worldwide in the decades since.
However, because antibiotics are a naturally formed biological weapon for combat between microbes, bacteria have been building resistance to them long before humanity started using them. Using the same antibiotics repeatedly allows bacteria to adapt to them even faster, resulting in an increase in the frequency of diseases that no longer respond to typical treatments.
Unfortunately, the more bacterial species that are resistant to antibiotics, the more individuals will succumb to resistant illnesses - and researchers are warning that antimicrobial resistance is now killing more people each year than HIV/AIDS or malaria combined.
The figures are based on a study of hospital, surveillance, and other data sources from 204 nations and territories by the Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators, an international organization of researchers.
Resistance to two types of antibiotics, beta-lactams (including penicillin) and fluoroquinolones, was responsible for more than 70% of resistance-related deaths. These medications are the first-line treatments for many bacterial infections.
The top three bacteria responsible for fatal drug-resistant infections, according to the researchers, were Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Staphylococcus aureus. These bacteria can cause serious infections in patients with weaker immune systems in health care settings.
The researchers discovered that treatment-resistant bacterial infections caused 64 deaths per 100,000 individuals worldwide and 16.4 deaths per 100,000 people in the United States. Western Sub-Saharan Africa had the highest mortality rates, with 114.8 deaths per 100,000 people linked to bacterial antimicrobial resistance and 27.3 deaths per 100,000 people attributable to resistance.
According to their calculations, only stroke and heart disease killed more people that year than antimicrobial resistance.
The authors state that this is the first time such a worldwide assessment has been done at all, to their knowledge. There are several limits to their modeling due to data gaps in some parts of the world and serious problems in carrying out antimicrobial resistance surveillance. However, the conclusion is unmistakable: we face a serious worldwide health crisis, apart from the already ravaging COVID-19 pandemic.
