Scientists warn the number of deaths caused by antibiotics-resistant diseases could spike by 2050

We keep hearing about new viruses and bacteria in the media. Some of them are even said to have the potential to trigger the next pandemic - for example, a virus that is very similar to the coronavirus and can also be found in bats was recently discovered in China.

According to experts, pandemics such as the coronavirus pandemic, which kept the world on tenterhooks in 2020, will actually occur more frequently in the coming years.

But will we even have the means to fight such diseases adequately in the future? Or rather, will we even be able to fight such pathogens with the means we have at our disposal? According to a new study, the answer could be critical - the reason for this is that viruses and bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

Research into antibiotic resistance of pathogens

According to a study on antimicrobial agents carried out by a research team led by Christopher Murray from the University of Washington in Seattle, the number of deaths from infections caused by antibiotic-resistant pathogens could increase by up to 70% by 2050. This was reported by the American broadcaster CNN and the German TV channel ZDF. The study was published in the medical journal The Lancet.

The researchers initially analysed 520 million data sets for their purposes in order to track the development of antibiotic resistance from 1990 to 2021. Based on this, estimates were then made as to what the situation could look like from 2025 to 2050.

Slight increase in the number of deaths per year in 2021

The results are alarming: if the improvement in medical care and the optimization of antibiotic agents are disregarded, 39 million people worldwide could have died from diseases caused by antibiotic-resistant pathogens by 2050. The researchers were already able to determine a slight increase per year between 1990 and 2021. In 1990 there were 1.06 million deaths compared to 1.14 million in 2021.

The reasons for this trend can easily be traced back to the overuse of antibiotics in medicine, both in humans and animals - but also to the use of such agents in plants. The scientists hope that their findings will help to ensure that countermeasures can be taken against such developments in the future.

This article has been translated from Gentside DE.

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Sources used:

CNN: Superbug crisis could get worse, killing nearly 40 million people by 2050, study estimates

The Lancet: Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance 1990-2021: a systematic analysis with forecasts to 2050

ZDF: Antibiotic resistance: study expects millions of deaths by 2050