News: Antimicrobial resistance must be addressed now, experts warn
About 750,000 deaths linked to antimicrobial resistance (AMR) could be prevented every year through available vaccines, water and sanitation, and infection control methods, experts estimate in a series of four papers in The Lancet. The reports focus on sustainable access to antibiotics, predicting that if the world ignores AMR now, the current global death toll of 4.95 million per year from infections linked to AMR will increase, with young infants, older people, and those with chronic illnesses or requiring surgical procedures at the highest risk, MedPage Today reported.
About 4.95 million of the 7.7 million estimated deaths attributed to bacterial infections each year are associated with drug-resistant pathogens, while 1.27 million are caused by bacteria resistant to available antibiotics, the authors wrote in the first article of the series, which puts not only vulnerable individuals at risk but also entire health systems.
“The window of opportunity to ensure our ability to treat bacterial infections is shrinking,” said series co-author Ramanan Laxminarayan, PhD, in an associated press release. “For too long, the problem of AMR has been seen as either not urgent or too difficult to solve. Neither is true. We need immediate action and the tools to do so are widely available.”
The authors noted that antimicrobial use in humans and animals is the key driver of resistance and global antimicrobial use has increased 46% in the last twenty years. In the second article, they show a modeling analysis which indicates that using existing approaches to mitigate AMR in low-to-middle income countries (LMIC) could prevent about 18% of all AMR-associated deaths in those countries, and improving infection prevention and control programs in health settings in LMICs with substantial AMR burden could prevent more than 337,000 AMR-associated deaths every year (8% of the total 4.3 million deaths that occur annually in those countries). Universal access to high-quality water, sanitation, and hygiene services would prevent 247,800 AMR-associated deaths, and pediatric vaccines could prevent 181,500.
Also, they pointed to a need for “global regulatory harmonization to decrease costs of new therapeutics and improve access worldwide,” and proposed that the following targets should be met by 2030 and be introduced at the high-level meeting of the United Nations General Assembly taking place in September 2024:
- 10% reduction in mortality from AMR
- 20% reduction in inappropriate antibiotic use
- 30% reduction in inappropriate animal antibiotic use
Editor’s note: To read MedPage Today’s coverage of this story, click here. To read the articles series published in The Lancet, click here.