Infections with drug-resistant superbugs are expected to kill roughly 40 million people over the next 25 years, according to a global estimate released on Monday, with researchers urging action to prevent this bleak scenario.
Superbugs — bacteria or infections that have developed antibiotic resistance, making them far more difficult to treat — are now recognized as a growing threat to world health.
The investigation is claimed as the first to examine the global impact of superbugs across time and predict what might happen next.
Between 1990 and 2021, the GRAM study published in The Lancet journal found that superbugs, often known as antimicrobial resistance (AMR), caused almost a million deaths annually worldwide.
According to the report, deaths from superbugs among children under the age of five have decreased by more than 50% over the last three decades as a result of improved neonatal infection prevention and control efforts.
However, when children contract superbugs, the infections are significantly more difficult to treat.
Over-70s mortality have increased by more than 80% within the same time period, as an ageing population has become more susceptible to illness.
According to the report, deaths from MRSA infections, a kind of staph bacteria that has developed resistant to several antibiotics, have more than doubled to 130,000 in 2021 from three decades ago.
The researchers utilized modelling to predict that, based on present trends, the number of direct deaths from AMR will increase by 67% to nearly two million per year by 2050.
According to the research, it would also contribute to an additional 8.2 million fatalities every year, or an almost 75% increase.
Threat to modern medicine
According to this scenario, AMR will have directly killed 39 million people over the following quarter century, contributing to a total of 169 million deaths.
However, less catastrophic outcomes are also possible.
According to the modelling, improving care for severe illnesses and availability to antimicrobial medications might save the lives of 92 million people by 2050.
The researchers examined 22 infections, 84 drug-pathogen combinations, and 11 infectious disorders, including meningitis.
The study analyzed data from 520 million individual records from 204 countries and territories.
“These findings highlight that AMR has been a significant global health threat for decades and that this threat is growing,” said study co-author Mohsen Naghavi from the Institute of Health Metrics in the United States.
Jeremy Knox, infectious disease policy head at the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based health charity, warned that the effects of rising AMR rates would be felt around the world.
“An increasing AMR burden at the scale described in the GRAM report would represent a steady undermining of modern medicine as we know it, as the antibiotics we rely upon to keep common medical interventions safe and routine could lose their effectiveness,” Knox told the news agency AFP.
While there has been a steady increase in political attention to the topic over the last decade, “we have yet to see governments around the world go far enough, fast enough in addressing the threat of AMR,” he said.
He hailed a high-level AMR conference at the United Nations on September 26 as a “vital moment” in the fight against superbugs.
Antimicrobial resistance is a natural phenomena, but the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in humans, animals, and plants has exacerbated the problem.