An 18-month review into antimicrobial resistance warns that superbugs will kill upwards of 10 million people a year by 2050, a frightening prospect that’s being described as “the antibiotic apocalypse.”
The new report, compiled by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in Britain, claims that the new era of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is already upon us, and that 50,000 people are already dying each year in Europe and the U.S. from untreatable infections. If nothing can be done to offset this trend, as many as 10 million people could die each year by the mid-point of the 21st century. That would make AMR worse than cancer.
“The golden age of antibiotics which the world has taken for granted for well over fifty years has ended,” wrote Sally Davies in the report. Davies, the chief medical officer for England, described the growing ineffectiveness of antibiotics around the world as being on the same level as terrorism and climate change.
“The projected figures are much more worrying,” she wrote. “It is quite possible—and perhaps even likely—that the recent era of material mortality improvements will give way to many years of material mortality worsening.”
Indeed, infections that used to be easily treated, such as tuberculosis and gonorrhea, have reemerged a serious health threat. Antibiotics are also used to prevent infections, and without them, surgeries would once-again become life-threatening. Individuals receiving organ transplants would have to rely on their own immune systems to prevent their bodies from rejecting donor organs. Pneumonia would return as a frightening mortal enemy.
In the report, British economist Lord O’Neill said that doctors and patients need to “stop treating antibiotics as sweets.” No doubt—the more that antibiotics are used, the less effective they become. O’Neill said this issue can no longer be ignored by politicians and the finance sector. He’s hoping that leaders of the world will make it a top priority at the upcoming G20 meeting to be held in China this September.
The mortality rate rises
Today, 23,000 Americans die each year from infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Across the world, the estimated annual mortality rate is 700,000. If these trends continue, by 2050, 10 million people globally will die each year, as the potent diseases of previous centuries return to their old force, according to the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance. In 2012, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported an estimated 450,000 new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. The emergence of multiple drug-resistant pneumonia and E.coli bacteria strains are predicted to contribute significantly to increased mortalities due to their ability to spread rapidly through populations.
It’s Not All Bad News
Scientists throughout the globe are joining forces to both create new antibiotics as well as devise ways to tackle infection without the need for these drugs in the first place.
The fact that more scientists as well as lay people are becoming aware of the current issue of antibiotic resistance is cause for optimism. We all play a role in ensuring that our planet does not revert back to the “dark ages of medicine,” and in order to ensure the future of our, it’s time to not only recognise but also act on the issue of antibacterial resistance.
