The Stubborn Germs That are Getting the Upper Hand

What kills more people than HIV or malaria? What threatens anybody on the planet – and not just people, but animals, too?

It’s antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the formal name for drug-resistant superbugs. These include bacteria that defy the effects of antibiotics, viruses that thrive in the face of antiviral drugs, and fungi that are immune to antifungal treatments.

Each year, an estimated 7.7 million deaths are caused by bacterial infections, and nearly 5 million of these deaths are associated with drug-resistant bacteria. These infections include newborn babies, the elderly, and cancer patients, but also people who were young, fit, and healthy before they got infected.

AMR is a major topic of discussion this year (2024) for the World Health Organization and it will take top billing at the United Nations General Assembly. To set the tone for all the discussion, the Lancet has published a series of four papers reviewing the problem and laying out some of the solutions. For the series, the One Health Trust's Dr. Ramanan Laxminarayan brought together experts from around the world to address the issue. 

Dr. Iruka Okeke of the Department of Pharmaceutical Microbiology at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria helped write the first of these papers. Dr. Okeke, a bacterial geneticist, points out that antimicrobial-resistant infections can happen anywhere – in hospital patients, in people leading their everyday lives, in farm animals, and in nature among wildlife.

It’s important to use antibiotics and other antimicrobial drugs properly, but also to make sure that people who need them can get the right antibiotics at the right time. It’s especially important to keep an eye out for these drug-resistant superbugs, she said. Surveillance helps doctors know whether patients coming in can be treated with everyday antibiotics, or if they need special, usually more expensive, drugs.

Skipping surveillance, she says in this episode of One World, One Health, is like playing tennis without keeping score. “If you play tennis and you are not keeping score, you are just practicing.”

Listen as Dr. Okeke explains why we all need to do a better job watching out for these killer germs.

Read more about the One Health Trust’s work on antimicrobial resistance here.