New superbugs that can resist antibiotics have killed about twice as many people as was previously expected, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a new report issued Wednesday.
- The new superbugs have sickened 2.8 million people and killed 35,000 each year, according to the report, indicating these bugs are a major public health threat.
- The report, which analyzed electronic health care data and records, discovered that, on average, these antibiotic-resisting bugs infect people every 11 seconds and cause a death every 15 minutes.
- According to the CDC, there are twice as many deaths from these infections compared to what was originally reported in 2013.
- The report adds five of these drug-resistant superbugs to a “urgent threat” list.
Context: According to the Washington Post: “Bacteria, fungi and other germs that have developed a resistance to antibiotics and other drugs pose one of the gravest public health challenges and a baffling problem for modern medicine. Scientists, doctors and public health officials have warned of this threat for decades, and the new report reveals the top dangers and troubling trends. More pathogens are developing new ways of fending off drugs designed to kill them, and infections are spreading more widely outside of hospitals. No new classes of antibiotics have been introduced in more than three decades.””
What they’re saying: CDC Director Robert Redfield said in a letter with the report that the public should “stop referring to a coming post-antibiotic era — it’s already here.”
“You and I are living in a time when some miracle drugs no longer perform miracles and families are being ripped apart by a microscopic enemy,” Redfield wrote, according to USA Today.
Michael Craig, a CDC senior adviser, told CNN: “This is a problem that ultimately affects all of us. It literally has the potential to affect every person on the planet.”
Tips: If superbugs are resistant to antibiotics, what can be done? Well, according to NPR, it might make sense to create drugs that buy the immune system time to kill the bugs.
- Another idea would be to have multiple drugs attack these superbugs all at once, NPR reports.
- “Psychologically it’s a bit scary putting all your firepower into one regimen,” Andrew Read, a biologist at Penn State University, told NPR. “On the other hand, it can work very effectively at preventing the evolution of resistance. So instead of just using drug A and that fails and then drug B and that fails, and then drug C, using A, B and C all together can stop any of them failing.”