Around 38 million civilians died worldwide because of World War II. The death toll of “the largest and most violent military conflict in human history” is a grim matter of the past, but something else is on a deadly trajectory to surpass that number: superbugs.
The product of antimicrobial resistance, superbugs are germs capable of overpowering the medications designed to kill them. According to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they are “one of the world’s most urgent public health problems.” And new research published inthe Lancet showed superbugs could result in more than 39 million deaths by 2050.
To determine how superbugs will affect the world’s populace over the coming decades, the researchers assessed around 520 million records of 1990-2021 medical data for 22 pathogens, 11 infections and 82 combinations of pathogens and their treatments. Within the data, patterns began to form.
Over the 31 years, the number of superbug-related deaths among children younger than 5 dropped by more than 50% — a good sign. Among older adults, those over 69, the death toll had increased by more than 80%.
“We had these two opposite trends going on: a decline in AMR (antimicrobial resistance) deaths under age 15, mostly due to vaccination, water and sanitation programs, some treatment programs, and the success of those,” lead author Dr. Chris Murray, University of Washington’s director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, told CNN Health. “And at the same time, there’s this steady increase in the number of deaths over age 50.”
The researchers anticipated these trends to continue, potentially affecting up to 8.2 million people in 2050 alone.
“There are still, unfortunately, a lot of places in low-resource settings where people who need antibiotics are just not getting them, and so that’s a big part of it,” Murray said. “But it’s not just the antibiotics. It’s when you’re sick, either as a kid or an adult, and you get sent to hospital, and you get a package of care, essentially, that includes things like oxygen.
“In low-resource settings, even basics like oxygen are often not available,” he continued. “And then, if you are very sick and you need an intensive care unit, well, there’s big parts of the low-resource world — most of them, actually — where you wouldn’t get access to that sort of care. So there’s a spectrum of supportive care, plus the antibiotics, that really make a difference.”
But, according to an associate dean of global health sciences and distinguished professor at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine, there still might be hope.
“I’m somebody who’s lived with antimicrobial resistance affecting my family for the last eight years,” Steffanie Strathdee, who is also co-director of UC San Diego’s Center for Innovative Phage Applications and Therapeutics, told CNN Health’s Jacqueline Howard. “My husband nearly died from a superbug infection. It’s actually one of the infections that’s highlighted in this paper.”
Her husband’s recovery was made possible by phages, viruses that seek and destroy certain kinds of bacteria. Used precisely, they can eliminate superbugs when antibiotics can’t.
“The most important alternative to antibiotics is phage therapy, or bacteriophage therapy, and that’s what saved my husband’s life,” Strathdee said. “Phage can be used very effectively with antibiotics, to reduce the amount of antibiotics that are needed, and they can even be used potentially in livestock and in farming.”
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