A recent study pegs bacterial antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to 569,000 deaths in 35 countries in 2019, but not all of them were definitely caused by it.
The report published Tuesday in The Lancet Regional Health – Americas evaluated data spanning 35 countries in the World Health Organization’s Americas region. It included 23 bacterial pathogens and 88 pathogen-drug combinations.
In 2019, more than 2 out of every 5 deaths involving an infection was linked to AMR — 11.5% globally. This means a drug-resistant infection contributed to a person’s death, but resistance may not be the sole cause (other factors could have come into play).
Of the deaths, 141,000 deaths were attributable to AMR, which means people died because of AMR directly.
Bacterial respiratory infections, blood-based infections, intra-abdominal infections and urinary tract infections were the culprits causing the most deaths in the region. The bacteria that were most deadly and caused 452,000 of the deaths directly from AMR were Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Acinetobacter baumannii.
Haiti, Bolivia, Guatemala, Guyana, and Honduras had the highest death rates directly from AMR, while the US, Colombia, Cuba, Panama, Costa Rica, Chile, Venezuela, Uruguay, and Jamaica had the lowest.
One point the nine countries with the highest death rates had in common: No AMR action plan. And if they had an action plan, they hadn’t published it. Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and the US published and financed their plans.
“Bacteria have developed resistance against the medicines we invented to kill them, and these pathogens are instead killing people at rates that are higher than HIV/AIDS or malaria. If policymakers, clinicians, scientists, and even the general public don’t implement new measures now, this global health crisis will worsen and could become uncontrollable,” said Lucien Swetschinski, co-author and researcher, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.
The news comes just as a report out this month in The Lancet Planetary Health emerged linking air pollution to AMR.
