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Antimicrobial resistance bacteria—or superbugs—kill about a million people a year and are considered to be one of the greatest risks to public health in the 21st century.
And the COVID-19 outbreak—with the widespread use of ineffective antibiotics—will only worsen the problem, according to a report.
The Financial Times reported that these microbes are resistant to antibiotics, in part due to the overuse of these drugs. These bacteria are now blamed for more deaths each year than either HIV/AIDS or malaria.
The number of people who die from these drug-resistant bacterial infections is debated, but there is a consensus that the number is at least a million.
The Lancet medical journal published an analysis that said 1.27 million people died from these infections in 2019 and 4.95 million deaths were tied to these ailments.
“I still think it is an underestimate of the reality,” Hanan Balkhy, the assistant director at the World Health Organization, said, according to the paper. “AMR it’s truly an existential threat to modern medicine in high, mid, and low-income countries.”
To put the number of deaths into perspective, COVID-19 has been blamed for 5.5 million deaths across the globe since the start of the outbreak over two years ago.
And that figure does not take into account the number of individuals who were “incidental” deaths. For example, those who had late-stage heart disease and came down with the virus.
NPR reported that the scientists studying the issue found that “bacteria are mutating to evade antibiotics at a pace far faster than many researchers had previously forecast.”
The report said these bacteria cause blood infections and terminal cases of sepsis. The report pointed out that the old school of thought was that the failure of antibiotics used to be considered only a first-world problem but the research shows that the issue is impacting all countries.
“In the past, we all thought that you had to be rich enough to use a lot of antibiotics inappropriately to have this problem,” Dr. Chris Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, said, according to NPR. “But that’s not the case.”
Researchers are studying why these bacteria have become so deadly and blame—in part—the wide use of antibiotics that leads to misuse, which can fuel mutations.
Fiorella Krapp Lopez, an infectious disease physician in Lima, Peru, told NPR that the COVID-19 outbreak likely worsened the issue in her country.
“First, there was a lot of antibiotic use during the pandemic,” she said, noting that many people did not want to go to the hospital early on in the outbreak and medicated at home. “It is still very easy to get antibiotics in a local pharmacy without a prescription. Unfortunately, more than 70, 80 percent of [COVID-19] patients that arrived at the hospital were already using antibiotics at home.”
Peru has had one of the highest per capita death rates from COVID-19. Krapp Lopez said she believes some of those deaths were due to secondary infections that were picked up at overcrowded hospitals.
“During the pandemic, the hospitals were overloaded,” she said, according to NPR. “A lot of patients went into ICUs that were understaffed. That was just the perfect storm to have a very high transmission of these [drug-resistant] pathogens,” she said.
TREND FORECAST: As we have been continually reporting, the drug lords are destroying humanity. The Trends Journal has reported on germs and society’s impossible effort to live in a 100 percent sterile environment.
There are hand soaps at every store counter placed in front of a cashier wearing an N-95 mask behind a plexiglass shield. (See “ANTIBIOTICS IN BABIES CAUSING MAJOR HEALTH CONCERNS” and “AS FORECAST: ANTIBIOTICS RESISTANCE A CRISIS.”)
We pointed out in our 9 March 2017 issue—long before anti-social distancing was a household term—that the more prescription drugs are consumed the less effective they become.
But, of course, the major drug dealers of the world—the giant pharmaceutical companies—would not be in existence if it was not for the public buying their product. The revenue they make goes right back into research and development so you can become dependent on a whole new product, and the cycle continues.
Gerald Celente, wrote in 2000: “…worldwide misuse of antibiotics was in the process of destroying their effectiveness on a massive scale. Medical authorities around the world were acknowledging a frightening scenario: The wonder bugs were winning the battle with wonder drugs.”
He continued, “With tens of millions of lives at risk from common infections that are resistant to antibiotics and can evolve into more serious medical conditions, these leading edge companies that create drugs to combat the superbug epidemic are positioned for enormous profit potential.”