Drug-Resistant Infections

 

The growing global threat posed by superbugs resistant to existing drugs will make the Covid pandemic “look minor”, the UK’s special envoy on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), Prof. Dame Sally Davies, has warned.

Davies said the immediate threat is “more acute” than climate change, while noting that the two crises are interlinked. She described what the world would be like if the problem is not tackled within a decade: “It looks like a lot of people with untreatable infections, and we would have to move to isolating people who were untreatable in order not to infect their families and communities. So, it’s a really disastrous picture. It would make some of Covid look minor,” said Davies, whose goddaughter died of an infection that could not be treated two years ago.

·       Is AMR already here? Yes. Drug-resistant infections already kill at least 1.2 million people a year, and one in five AMR deaths is in a child aged under five, usually in sub-Saharan Africa.

·       How are the climate crisis and AMR connected? Davies pointed to the way displacement, flooding and lack of clean water spread infection.   

-The Guardian