Humanity is running out of antibiotics against resistant bacteria, which could lead to millions of deaths each year, according to the World Health Organization.
“It’s one of the biggest health threats we’ve identified.”
This is how Peter Beyer of the Department of Essential Medicines of the World Health Organization (WHO) described the growing antibiotic resistance on the part of bacteria during a press briefing in Geneva, Switzerland. “We are seeing this spreading and we are running out of effective antibiotics against these resistant bacteria,” he added.
In a press release dated Friday, January 17, the health agency attached to the UN warned of the worsening antibiotic resistance of many pathogenic bacteria. According to a study published in November 2018 in the journal The Lancet Infectious Diseases33,000 people died in the European Union in 2015 for lack of having received an antibiotic treatment effective against bacteria who have developed resistance.
It is therefore essential to develop new antibiotics. “Many initiatives are underway to reduce resistance, but we also need countries and the pharmaceutical industry to get more involved and provide sustainable funding and new innovative medicines,” explained the WHO director. , Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Over-prescription of antibiotics responsible
Discovered in the 1920s, antibiotics have since saved tens of millions of lives by helping to counter bacteriological diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and meningitis. But the over-prescription of antibiotics, especially for common viral infections, has caused bacteria to resist the drugs. They also develop resistance when patients do not complete their treatment: by surviving, they develop immunity.
In 2015, of the total of 670,000 infections by multi-resistant bacteria, nearly 75% were contracted in a hospital environment. The overconsumption of antibiotics is one of the main factors in the appearance of resistant genes in pathogenic bacteria. These genes can appear by mutation in the presence of the antibiotic, but especially by exchanging genes with other bacteria, including bacteria normally present naturally in the organism, and which would have developed these resistances.
No new effective drugs for ten years
The WHO has indicated that to counter this antibiotic resistance, around 60 new drugs, including 50 antibiotics, are currently under development. But they “provide few advantages over existing treatments and only two target the most resistant bacteria”, that is to say Gram-negative bacteria.
The health agency also said that 252 more innovative drugs were also in preclinical trials but that the most effective of them will not be available for ten years.
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