A landmark recent study estimates that antibacterial resistant pathogens or AMR, will kill more than 39 million people by 2050.
The study published in the Lancet also predicts that 169 million deaths will be associated with drug-resistant infections by that year.
“These findings highlight that AMR has been a significant global health threat for decades and that this threat is growing,” said Mohsen Naghavi, a professor at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation and the study’s author.
The Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM) Project carried out the study, which saw over 500 researchers collect and analyze data from 204 counties over a period of 30 years, in what is the first global analysis of AMR trends.
Based on the data, the researchers forecast that South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean will have the highest AMR mortality rates by 2050.
AMR occurs when microorganisms that cause disease such as bacteria, viruses, or fungi no longer respond to medicines used to treat them.
Overuse and misuse of antimicrobials are the main drivers of AMR according to the World Health Organization.
However, millions of deaths could be averted via better prevention of infections, improved healthcare access, and new antibiotics, the GRAM study found.
