Scientists estimate that drug-resistantbacteria killed more people than either HIV or Malaria in 2019.
4.95 million deaths in the same year were estimated to be caused by antibiotic-resistant infections.
The study was funded by the U.K. government and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today, according to the WHO.
Sometimes antibiotics are needed to treat infections. The misuse of antibiotics in the treatment of viral infections like colds has helped somebacteria evolve to become resistant to them.
Higher medical costs, longer hospital stays and increased mortality are caused by this resistance. More than 35,000 people die from antibiotic-resistant infections in the U.S. each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Antibiotics are becoming less effective against thebacteria that cause illnesses as a growing number of illnesses are becoming more difficult to treat.
According to the research paper, the emergence of antimicrobial resistance is one of the leading public health threats of the 21st century.
The study looked at over 500 million individual records from 204 countries and territories. The estimates were based on the number of deaths caused by 23 pathogens and 88 pathogen-drug combinations.
Pneumonia, which was responsible for 400,000 deaths, was the most burdensome infectious syndrome. Bloodstream infections and other drug-resistant infections were the cause of deaths in 2019. The three syndromes accounted for 80% of deaths.
The study found that E. coli and MRSA were the drug resistantbacteria that led to the most deaths. Researchers found that so-called "superbug" MRSA accounted for more than 100,000 deaths.
Researchers said that the WHO identified the six pathogens that caused the most deaths from the study as priority pathogens.
According to the study, 16.4 deaths in every 100,000 were caused by drug resistantbacteria in 2019. In western sub-Saharan Africa, the rate rose to 27.3 per 100,000 deaths.
Researchers said that deaths associated with, but not directly caused by,bacteria, accounted for 64 in every 100,000 deaths in 2019.
The scientists said in their paper that their findings clearly show that drug resistance in each of these leading pathogens is a major global health threat that warrants more attention, funding, capacity building, research and development, and pathogen-specific priority setting from the broader global health community.
The authors of the study called for strict intervention strategies to address the threat posed by drug resistantbacteria. Reducing human exposure to antibiotics in meat is one of the suggestions made in the paper.
It was necessary to maintain investment in the development of new antibiotics.
In the past few decades, investments have been small compared with other public health issues with similar or less impact.
The authors of the study acknowledged that their research had some limitations, including sparsity of data from low- and middle-income countries.
Efforts to build laboratory infrastructure are paramount to addressing the large and universal burden of AMR, by improving the management of individual patients and the quality of data in local and global surveillance.
The indirect effects of AMR would be evaluated in the future with the help of enhanced infrastructure.
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