Chasing Life

We’ve focused so much of our public health attention the past two years on Covid-19, but there’s another major public health threat that worries me: antibiotic resistance.   At least 1.27 million people globally died in 2019 due to drug-resistant bacterial infections, according to a new study published last week in the journal The Lancet.   The study found that if all superbug infections had not occurred that year, 4.95 million deaths could have been prevented in 2019, and if all drug-resistant bacterial infections were replaced by infections that could have been adequately treated, 1.27 million lives could have been saved.   Antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, is when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites become resistant to the drugs typically used to treat the infections they cause.   "By any metric, bacterial AMR is a leading global health issue," an international team of researchers wrote in the study, adding that resistance appears to be a leading cause of death, ahead of both HIV and malaria.   Among 23 pathogens studied, the researchers found that six accounted for 73.4% of deaths attributable to pathogens that had outsmarted our current drugs: E. coli, Staphylococcus aureus, K. pneumoniae, S pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. For deaths attributable to antimicrobial resistance, E. coli was responsible for the most deaths in 2019, according to the researchers.   Here in the US, someone dies from a drug resistant superbug every 15 minutes.   But there are ways for us to get ahead of this issue: by using fewer antibiotics. These superbugs are driven by the overuse and misuse of antibiotics.   There is a need for antibiotics, but they aren't a panacea for everything. Instead of immediately treating a sinus infection or an ear infection with an antibiotic, make sure it isn’t a viral infection.   And the same steps that we’ve been practicing to protect ourselves against Covid-19 like washing our hands are good practice against superbugs, too. Healthy habits help stop the spread of germs. WHO calls antibiotic resistance a top 10 global health threat facing humanity. But we can also let our humanity come together to fight this threat.