New study published in journal The Lancet suggests deaths caused by antibiotic resistance continues to worsen and has now outpaced deaths caused by malaria and HIV.

Researchers, lead by University of Washington, analyzing data from scientific literature regarding antibiotic resistance, found in 2019, 4.95 million deaths globally were associated with antimicrobial drug resistance while 1.27 million were directly caused by drug-resistant bacterial infections. The data included 471 million individual records of 204 countries.

Globally, Australasia had lowest burden of antibiotic resistance while Western sub-Sahara Africa had the highest. The most common bacteria to cause deaths through antimicrobial resistance include E.coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Streptococcus pneuomoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. These are the usual suspects in the United States as well. All six of the named pathogens accounted for 73.4% of all deaths due to antibacterial resistance. Lower respiratory infections by antimicrobial resistance bacteria were the most burdensome accounting for more than 1.5 million deaths.

“These new data reveal the true scale of antimicrobial resistance worldwide, and are a clear signal that we must act now to combat the threat,” stated study’s co-author, Christopher Murray, in a press release.

Maybe everyone should stop going to their physician’s office pretending they know what they’re talking about and demanding antibiotics. Or, maybe some of you men out there should man-up and just put up with a cold for a few weeks. Even more so, maybe the healthcare community should stop bending to people asking for antibiotics and practice some real medicine, such as not futilely throwing antibiotics at every infection, including viral infections, for example say, COVID19?

And maybe we should stop factory farming where the industry uses up to also 80% or more of all antibiotics sold. This one to be continued.

C Murray et al. at Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators. Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis. The Lancet 2022. Online First: 01/19/22. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(21)02724-0