Deaths From Antibiotic-Resistant Infections Could Reach 39 Million by 2050, Study Suggests

More than 39 million people around the globe could die because of antibiotic-resistant infections between 2025 and 2050—a statistic that equates to about three deaths every minute, according to a new study.

The results, published Monday in the journal The Lancet, add to the growing body of evidence that drug-resistant “superbugs” are a major threat to public health.

“It’s a big problem, and it is here to stay,” says study co-author Christopher J. L. Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, to the Washington Post’s Lizette Ortega.

Doctors, scientists and public health experts have long warned of the potential consequences of worsening antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. It occurs when bacteria, fungi and pathogens evolve to withstand existing medications, including antibiotics, making them harder to kill. Experts say the overuse of antibiotics—among both humans and livestock—has contributed to the problem, along with environmental factors that have allowed superbugs to thrive.

In the new study, an international team of scientists with the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance Project offer a detailed look at antimicrobial resistance around the world. They analyzed 520 million records from 204 countries and territories, including death certificates, hospital discharge documents and insurance claims. Then, they used statistical modeling to calculate deaths related to antimicrobial resistance from 1990 to 2021. They also made projections about how antimicrobial resistance would affect fatalities in the future.

In 1990, 1.06 million deaths were attributable to antimicrobial resistance, the team finds. That number rose to 1.27 million in 2019, then dipped to 1.14 million in 2021. (The researchers say the decrease was likely caused by health protocols put in place during the Covid-19 pandemic.)

Beyond these broad metrics, the researchers also zoomed in and looked at how antimicrobial resistance affected people of different ages. For kids ages 5 and younger, deaths attributable to antibiotic resistance declined by more than 50 percent between 1990 and 2021, “mostly due to vaccination, water and sanitation programs, some treatment programs, and the success of those,” Murray tells CNN’s Jacqueline Howard. But for patients ages 70 and older, the number of deaths increased by more than 80 percent during the same period.

Over the last three decades, those opposite trends have largely balanced each other out. But as the world’s population ages, deaths among elderly people will likely outpace the decrease in deaths among younger people. The team estimates that deaths among children will be cut in half by 2050, but deaths among seniors will double.

Developing new antibiotics will help tackle the problem, potentially averting millions of deaths, per the paper. But improving access to those drugs is also necessary. Deaths from antimicrobial resistance will also affect regions of the world differently, with South Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa likely to be hit the hardest, according to the study. Those low-resource regions also face a lack of access to quality health care, including antibiotics.

“Drug resistance is not their primary issue [in low-access regions]—their primary issue is bacterial infections itself,” says Ramanan Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist at One Health Trust who was not involved in the research, to Euronews Health’s Gabriela Galvin.

The new paper is comprehensive and serves as another wake-up call about the need to combat superbugs. But “predicting antimicrobial resistance trends is very unreliable,” says Marlieke de Kraker, an epidemiologist at Geneva University Hospitals in Switzerland who was not involved with the research, to New Scientist’s Michael Le Page. New superbugs can emerge or disappear at a moment’s notice, and scientists still don’t have a good understanding of what causes these unpredictable swings, she adds.

Still, the findings suggest “more must be done to protect people from this growing global health threat,” says study co-author Stein Emil Vollset, an epidemiologist at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and the University of Washington’s Institute of Health Metrics, in a statement.

“We urgently need new strategies to decrease the risk of severe infections through vaccines, new drugs, improved health care, better access to existing antibiotics and guidance on how to use them most effectively,” he adds.

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Sarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.