The results of the study — which was funded by the UK government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — were published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet on Wednesday.
The World Health Organization has described antibiotic resistance as “one of the greatest threats to global health, food security and development today”, and said that although the phenomenon occurs naturally, overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals accelerates the process.
Antibiotics are sometimes needed to treat or prevent bacterial infections. But the overuse and misuse of antibiotics — such as in the treatment of viral infections like the common cold, against which they are not effective — have helped some bacteria evolve to become resistant.
This resistance threatens our ability to treat common illnesses, leading to higher medical costs, longer hospital stays and increased mortality. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, resulting in the death of more than 35,000 people.
A growing number of diseases, including pneumonia, tuberculosis and gonorrhea, are becoming harder to treat as antibiotics become a less effective tool against the bacteria that cause them.
The authors of the research paper describe bacterial antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as “one of the major public health threats of the 21st century”, adding that their study presents the first global estimates of the burden it adds to populations around the world. whole.
The study looked at 471 million individual records from 204 countries and territories and analyzed data from existing studies, hospitals and other sources. His estimates were based on the number of deaths resulting from and associated with bacterial AMR for 23 pathogens (organisms that cause disease) and 88 pathogen-drug combinations.
Lower respiratory tract infections like pneumonia, responsible for 400,000 deaths, were the “heaviest infectious syndrome” linked to bacterial AMR.