HQ Team
September 18, 2024: Antibiotic-resistant infections may kill 39.1 million people in the next 25 years equating to three deaths a minute, a global study finds.
Additionally, illnesses associated with resistance to available antibiotics will further claim the lives of 169 million people, according to a study by the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) project, a global team of researchers.
Antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites no longer respond to antimicrobial medicines due to overuse or misuse.
As a result of drug resistance, antibiotics and other antimicrobial medicines become ineffective and infections become difficult or impossible to treat, increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, disability and death, according to the World Health Organization.
The UK Department of Health and Social Care’s Fleming Fund gave financial support to the study using UK aid, and the Wellcome Trust. It was published in The Lancet journal.
520 million datasets
The project turned out estimates for 22 pathogens, 84 pathogen-drug combinations, and 11 infectious syndromes, including meningitis, bloodstream infections, and other infections, among people of all ages in 204 countries and territories.
The estimates were based on 520 million individual datasets from sources, including hospital data, death records, and antibiotic use data.
“While there has been some progress tackling antimicrobial resistance in recent years, it isn’t enough and more needs to be done,” said Dr Timothy Jinks, Head of Interventions in Wellcome Trust’s Infectious Disease team.
“The GRAM estimates are an important tool in the fight against antimicrobial resistance, and we hope that global policymakers utilise the paper’s findings to make evidence-based decisions…implementation of bold action on antimicrobial resistance can strengthen health systems and protect the world’s most vulnerable from infectious disease.”
The study, the first to analyse the trends globally and over time, estimated that in 2050, there will be 1·91 million global annual deaths directly attributable to antimicrobial resistance
and 8·22 million annual deaths associated with the other illness caused by it.
Children younger than five years
Researchers found that from 1990 to 2021, deaths from antimicrobial resistance decreased by more than 50% among children younger than five years and increased by more than 80% for adults 70 years and older.
Increases in deaths attributable to antimicrobial resistance will be largest among those 70 years and older of all-age deaths attributable to the resistance in 2050.
“Under the better care scenario, across all age groups, 92·0 million deaths could be cumulatively averted between 2025 and 2050, through better care of severe infections and improved access to antibiotics,” the researchers wrote in the journal.
In a Gram-negative drug scenario, 11·1 million antimicrobial deaths could be averted through the development of a Gram-negative drug pipeline to prevent antimicrobial-resistant deaths.
The future burden was highest in South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, Oceania, and sub-Saharan Africa. The cumulative antimicrobial-resistant attributable death burden from 2025 to 2050 was forecasted at 11·8 million in South Asia — the highest at 30% — out of the 39.1 million deaths.
The South Asia region includes India, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
‘Here to stay’
“It’s a big problem, and it is here to stay,” said Christopher J. L. Murray, senior author of the study and director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
Given the high variability of the antimicrobial resistance burden by location and age, “it is important that interventions combine infection prevention, vaccination, minimisation of inappropriate antibiotic use in farming and humans, and research into new antibiotics to mitigate the number of deaths that are forecasted for 2050,” the researchers wrote in The Lancet.
“These findings highlight that antimicrobial resistance has been a significant global health threat for decades and that this threat is growing’, said study author, Dr Mohsen Naghavi of IHME.
“Understanding how trends in deaths have changed over time, and how they are likely to shift in future, is vital to make informed decisions to help save lives,” he said, according to a GRAM statement.
The study comes ahead of the September 26 meeting of health leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York. The leaders are set to consider new actions to combat antimicrobial resistance.
