The rising death toll from drug-resistant bugs is “very scary” and people do not even realise it is happening, the UK’s special envoy for antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has said.
Superbugs kill more than a million people each year but neither governments nor the public recognise the scale of the threat, doctors complain. The crisis is largely driven by the misuse of antibiotics – about 70% of which are given to livestock – which encourages the evolution of microbes too strong for modern medicine to handle.
“We need to use antibiotics safely and appropriately,” said Sally Davies, who stepped down as England’s chief medical officer in 2019 to champion the UK’s fight against superbugs.
By 2050 it is projected that drug-resistant bugs will kill
nearly 2 million people each year and play a role in the deaths of 8 million people. The figures put AMR in a similar ballpark to the Covid-19 pandemic, which the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates led to 4m excess deaths in 2020 and 10m in 2021.
Data published on Thursday showed a rise in serious antibiotic-resistant infections in 2023 to 66,730 cases, above pre-pandemic levels.
E coli caused 65% of cases in the UK over the past five years.
“Some people talk about [AMR] being a pandemic – it is,” Davies said. “Is it a slow-developing one, an insidious one, or what? I don’t mind the words you want to use, but it’s pretty awful.”
World leaders have taken little action to cut AMR-related deaths but they promised to reduce them by 10% by 2030 at the UN general assembly in September. Public health experts are frustrated by the lack of interest from governments and the lack of awareness among the public.
“It’s clearly a lack of prioritisation – and that must be a failure of our communication,” Davies said. “That’s in part the name, ‘antimicrobial resistance’, AMR, in part the complexity, and the big bit that’s hidden … they [doctors] don’t tell people what they’re dying of.”
