The Rise of Antibiotic Resistant Infections
The recent development of the “superbug” poses a new global health challenge this year. In the summer of 2016, a women returned home to Nevada with a strange bacterial infection that she acquired while in India. Her doctors end up prescribing her a total of 26 different antibiotics, encompassing all of the ones available today, but to no avail. Eventually this infection was named “carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae” by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is just a fancy way of saying “bacteria resistant.” According to the World Health Organization, “antimicrobial resistance (AMR) happens when bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi develop resistance against medicines that were previously able to cure them.” So, these infections have literally been able to adapt to current medicines so that they are no longer affected by them.
The so-called “superbug” has actually threatened humanity for years, but its recent rise in prevalence is concerning. Researchers estimate that superbugs kill approximately 700,000 people in one year.
Common and life-threatening infections like pneumonia, gonorrhoea, as well as HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria are becoming more an more untreatable because of these superbugs. If this goes problem is not managed properly, AMR’s can have a significant social, health security, and economic impact that will seriously hurt the development of countries, especially those that are already poor and lacking in fundamental health care needs.
According to WHO’s report, the high levels of AMR already seen in the world today come from the overuse and misuse of antibiotics and other antimicrobials in humans, animals, and crops, as well as the spread of residues of these medicines in soil, crops, and water.
What is the solution to this problem? At the United Nation General Assembly last September, world leaders agreed to take action and make antibiotics more efficient and more accessible. Addressing this issue involves taking better preventative actions, such as water sanitation, immunization, good hygiene, and protection of animals and agriculture. The assembly also stressed the importance of increasing investments in medical research to better promote the development of effective and cheap medicines and diagnostic tests. Vaccines, officials said, are “a global priority.”
While vaccines are incredibly important, what happens when bacteria keeps adapting to new vaccines? To prevent this problem from getting worse, more funding and research needs to go into making future antibiotics resistant to ever-adapting bacteria.