We are losing the war against superbugs

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Editor's note: Nearly five million deaths in just one year where antibiotic resistance was a contributing factor. And out of those, 1.27 million succumbed directly because of infection with antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”. Let those numbers sink in. Superbugs today are causing more deaths than HIV/AIDS or malaria. The next pandemic is already here, and unless we act decisively now, things will only get worse. Today, antibiotics typically last a decade or less from the time they’re approved to the point when we have to save them up for the most serious patients that don’t respond to other treatments. A study published on 19 January in The Lancet—one of the world’s most prestigious medical journals—by a global consortium of antimicrobial resistance collaborators has shaken up the biomedical world. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) seems to be mounting faster than we had predicted. An earlier estimate was that AMR would lead to around 10 million deaths annually by 2050, but with an estimate of 4.95 million deaths in 2019, we are almost halfway there. As a microbiologist, I’m keenly familiar with the problem of antibiotic resistance, but …