Why humans are losing the race against superbugs
Jason Beaubien / NPR :
Drug-resistant bacteria also known as superbugs are on the rise globally, and they’re now killing more people each year than either HIV/AIDS or malaria. And low- and middle-income countries are being hit the hardest by the rise in antibiotic-resistant infections.
“That resistance out there is actually now one of the leading causes of death in the world,” says Dr. Chris Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Murray is one of the authors of a new study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, that finds that in 2019, drug-resistant infections directly killed 1.2 million people and played a role in 5 million more deaths worldwide. Murray and his colleagues set out to quantify how much of a problem antibiotic resistance is globally, and they found that bacteria are mutating to evade antibiotics at a pace far faster than many researchers had previously forecast.
These deadly new strains of bacteria are causing untreatable blood infections, fatal pneumonia, relentless urinary tract infections, gangrenous wounds and terminal cases of sepsis, among other conditions. The conventional wisdom used to be that the failure of antibiotics was a “First World” problem. But Murray says this new study shows it happening all over the world. “In the past, we all thought that you had to be rich enough to use a lot of antibiotics inappropriately to have this problem,” he says. “But that’s not the case.” The researchers calculate that deaths caused directly by antibiotic resistance are the highest in sub-Saharan Africa, causing 24 deaths per 100,000 population annually, compared with an average fatality rate of 13 per 100,000 in high-income countries. Australia has the lowest mortality rate globally from antibiotic resistance, at 6 deaths per 100,000. Latin America is right in the middle. But Fiorella Krapp Lopez, an infectious disease physician in Lima, Peru, says being in the middle is still quite bad. “We do have a very high frequency of resistance to different types of antibiotics, first line and second line [antibiotics],” Krapp says. “And the problem has been increasing in the last years.” She says antibiotic resistance is affecting every level of health care in Peru.
“Unfortunately, I think it’s everywhere. We are seeing it in the community with infections that used to be very simple to treat, like urinary infections,” she says. Physicians are seeing minor wounds that in the past may have needed only a bandage but now are turning into multidrug-resistant infections. “And we also see it in very sick patients with bloodstream infections or very severe pneumonia. So unfortunately, it’s across the full spectrum of bacterial infectious diseases right now in Peru,” she says.