United States: As many as 39 million people could die from antibiotic-resistant infections between now and 2050, reveals a study out on Monday in the Lancet journal.
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The authors of the study expect that figures of deaths resulting from antimicrobial resistance (AMR) will rise by a proportionate of seventy percent between 2022 and 2050 and that the elderly people are the most vulnerable group that will be driving the fatality figures.
AMR refers to any resistance where microbes, including bacteria and fungus, develop mechanisms that make them difficult to eradicate using available drugs.
More about the study
A study published on Monday in The Lancet said over thirty-nine million people could die of antibiotic-resistant infections in the time period from now to 2050, the Washington Post reported.
The researchers analyzed 520 million datasets, all the same, including records of discharged hospitals, insurance claims, and global mortality data from 204 different countries.
In this study, the authors used statistical methods to estimate that AMR was linked to at least 1 million deaths every year between 1990 and 2021. Since then, AMR deaths have only continued to rise and grow at a faster rate, as the researchers noted.
What more have the experts stated?
Kevin Ikuta, a lead author on the study and an assistant professor of clinical medicine at UCLA, noted that the projected 39 million deaths over the next quarter-century equal 70,000 deaths a year and about three deaths every minute.
Their study also implies that the roles are unequally divided between spouses, and the women seem to be carrying most of the load.
Consequently, over the period 1990 and 2021, children of 5years and below recorded reduced death of AMR by more than 50 percent, while seniors of 70 years and above recorded increased death of AMR by more than 80 percent.
According to Ikuta, “Increasingly, we’re seeing that antibiotics are being overused or misused, which just puts more pressure on bacteria to become more resistant as time goes on,” the Washington Post reported.