Opinion | The antibiotic resistance pandemic: a hidden killer that must be stopped
- Drug-resistant bacterial infections have quietly become a leading cause of death, even as the world is preoccupied with Covid-19
- As overused drugs fail to work, the success of modern medicine in treating common infections is threatened
When I was a young doctor practising medicine in Singapore 25 years ago, an elderly woman who had just undergone successful knee replacement surgery came back to hospital with a wound that was infected by a common skin bacterium.
Within mere days she had died because the bacterium turned out to be resistant to every single type of antibiotic we had in our arsenal. She is a patient I still think about today because she reminded me of my grandmother.
My grandmother also had knee osteoarthritis from all the housework she did while squatting, like many women of her generation. This patient died because a common bacterium had turned into a superbug.
The world understandably remains preoccupied with emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic – but a new report has highlighted the urgency of another potentially deadlier, long-term health threat.
A global study of deaths attributable to AMR, recently published by The Lancet, highlights the danger of bacteria evolving due to antibiotic overuse over time. Today, AMR is among the top 10 global public health threats. It is already the third leading cause of death, behind heart attacks and strokes, and kills more people than Aids or malaria worldwide.