Los Angeles Times – A new report finds that unless officials take action to develop new medications, superbug infections could kill nearly 2 million people a year in 2050.
Since the dawn of the antibiotic age, opportunistic pathogens have evolved defenses faster than humans can develop drugs to combat them.
At the same time, humans have unwittingly given the bugs an advantage through the overuse of antibiotics, allowing pathogens that survive their exposure to pass on their resistant traits.
Now, a new report finds that unless officials take action to develop new medications, “superbug” infections could kill nearly 2 million people a year in 2050 — a 67.5% increase from the 1.14 million lives lost this way in 2021.
An additional 8.22 million will die of causes related to those infections in 2050, according to a study from the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance Project published this week in the Lancet, a medical journal.
Between 1990 and 2021, deaths due to antimicrobial resistance increased more than 80% for people ages 70 and up.
GRAM is a joint project of the University of Oxford and the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
The report is the most comprehensive assessment yet of the risk of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, which the World Health Organization has long identified as one of the top 10 threats to global public health.
It was released in advance of a United Nations General Assembly meeting later this month on drug-resistant pathogens.
“The numbers in the Lancet paper represent a staggering and unacceptable level of human suffering,” said Henry Skinner, chief executive of the AMR Action Fund, a public-private partnership that invests in new antibiotic development, who was not involved in the study.
“A continued failure of governments to meet their moral obligations to protect and care for their people, as this paper shows, will doom millions of people to needless deaths … ”
