Resistance occurs when microbes acquire the ability to survive drugs that used to be lethal to them, meaning that such drugs no longer cure infections. The widespread use of antibiotics in both agriculture and healthcare is causing more microbes to become resistant and spread around the world, but the full extent of the problem is not clear.
Eve Wool of the Seattle-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) and her colleagues tried to calculate the annual number of deaths due to antibiotic resistance from 1990 to 2021.
“Our calculations are based on more than 500 million records, says E. Wool. “We have a large geographical and temporal coverage.”
Although the overall number of deaths from this was increasing, the team found that vaccinations and better health care were reducing the number of deaths among young children. Since 1990 until 2021 deaths due to antibiotic resistance among children under the age of 5 decreased by more than 50 percent and among adults over 70 by more than 80 percent.
Overall, antibiotic resistance deaths increased from 1.06 million in 1990 up to 1.27 million in 2019, and then decreased to 1.14 million. 2021, the research team concludes. However, it is estimated that the decrease in 2020 and 2021 is a temporary spike due to measures to control COVID-19 that have also reduced other types of infections, rather than a long-term improvement in the fight against resistance.
According to the study’s “most likely” scenario for the coming decades, by 2050 deaths from antibiotic resistance will increase to 1.91 million per year. A scenario in which new antibiotics are developed against the most problematic bacteria would prevent 11 million deaths between now and mid-century. deaths. In a better scenario, where more people also have access to quality healthcare, even more deaths would be avoided.
This 1.91 million the number of deaths per year is much lower than the often cited 10 million. number of deaths in 2050, presented in 2016 in the overview.
That prediction was based on less reliable estimates — and included the problem of non-antibiotic resistance in diseases such as HIV and malaria, says research team member Mohsen Naghavi, also at the IHME.
According to Marlieke de Kraker, a spokeswoman for the Geneva University Hospitals in Switzerland, the new study is more comprehensive than previous ones, but still has some major flaws. For example, it is assumed that the risk of antibiotic-resistant infections leading to death is the same worldwide, although this is not the case.
She is also skeptical of the team’s predictions. “I think predicting antimicrobial resistance trends is very unreliable,” says de Kraker. Drug-resistant versions of microbes can suddenly appear or disappear without experts really understanding the underlying mechanisms, she said. In addition, there are often unexpected events that cannot be predicted.
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2024-09-20 15:56:13
