SCIENTISTS WITH GRAM SAY THAT SUPERBUGS WILL KILL 40 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE NEXT 25 YEARS
It’s been a while now since the public first heard the term “superbug,” never mind “superbugs.” I vaguely remember it being a scary concept, but not something I needed to worry about in my younger years. Alas, that was more than a few thousand minutes ago, and the fact that the term is now an active plural says a lot about how much the threat has increased. So what are superbugs? They’re bacterial infections that we can’t treat with antibiotics. Or anything else. In other words, if you catch one of these nasty maladies, that’s probably going to be the end of you. And a recent GRAM report says that these maladies are likely to kill about 40 million people over the next 25 years.
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THE GRAM PROJECT LOOKED AT A NUMBER OF SUPERBUGS, AND HOW THEY INTERACT WITH DRUGS
So what is GRAM? It’s the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance (GRAM), and their project that produced this report was a collaboration between the University of Oxford in the UK and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. The project has received funding from several sources, including the Wellcome Trust and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The project looked at 11 different types of infections like meningitis, 22 different germs, and the differences between 84 germ-drug interactions of people in 84 countries, across all ages. And their projections of what is likely to come in terms of fatalities from superbugs is enough to scare a hermit in the middle of nowhere.
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SUPERBUGS WILL ALSO HELP OTHER THINGS KILL 170 MILLION PEOPLE BY 2050
But the numbers actually get even scarier. In the year 2050, which isn’t all that far away, the GRAM project foresees superbugs all on their own killing 1.91 million people. But it also projects that between now and 2050, superbugs will help kill another 170 million people. In other words, superbugs are killers, and will help a lot of something else’s kill you a lot easier. But yes, scientists all over the world are trying to find a solution, mostly looking for a new type of antibiotic these superbugs aren’t immune to.
And yet, I wouldn’t count on something like that anytime soon. You can see the report itself here.
