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AMR to claim tens of millions of lives by 2050: study

Tens of millions of people will die over the next 25 years because of bacterial infections that can resist antibiotic treatments, new research has predicted, showing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) cases are set to swell by 2050.

There will be 1.91 million annual deaths as a direct result of AMR by 2050 and 8.22 million with AMR as a factor, according to forecasting published in The Lancet, a medical journal. That’s compared to 1.27 million deaths from AMR in 2019. From 2025 to 2050, the researchers predicted, AMR will kill 39.1 million people and contribute to 169 million deaths.

The research was published less than 10 days ahead of a high-level UN General Assembly meeting to discuss AMR. The 26 September gathering, intended to boost international coordination and funding to fight AMR, will culminate in a political declaration, which is still being negotiated by diplomats.

The new research demonstrates the scale of the challenge, which is notoriously difficult to manage, requiring coordination between governments in a tense geopolitical atmosphere and major reform across sectors as disparate as farming and pharmaceuticals.

The research also indicated geographic hotspots for AMR are expected to overlap with many crisis settings and regions affected by the worst impacts of climate change. “The future AMR burden is highest in south Asia, southeast Asia, east Asia, and Oceania, and sub-Saharan Africa,” said the report.

This “leads to a worry about how to support those countries to develop their vaccine programs, cleanliness, and access to antibiotics”, Sally Davies, the UK Special Envoy on AMR and former chief medical officer, told The Telegraph. The study “confirms that the world is facing an antibiotic emergency, with devastating human costs for families and communities across the world”, she added.

Humanitarian crises settings – which often suffer from disrupted healthcare, poor infection control, and deteriorated antibiotic regulations – are potential hotspots, according to experts from groups like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF).

But AMR has long been a growing problem outside of disasters too, as Indian doctors told The New Humanitarian in 2022. This is thanks to an overdependence on antimicrobial drugs – sometimes bought directly by sick people themselves rather than prescribed by a doctor – and scarce diagnostic equipment and trained personnel. Find out more below:

Doctors at Continental Hospital in Hyderabad, India, were alarmed at the number of drug resistant bacteria they found in patient samples as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold.

Thanks to COVID-19, alarm grows over drug-resistant infections

‘Superbugs’ may have benefited from the pandemic, as use of antibiotics grew and vaccination and sanitation programmes were curtailed.

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