The World Health Organization (WHO) is worried about a “silent pandemic” of infections caused by deadly pathogens that doctors can’t treat because they don’t have any new drugs.
This is what Dr. Valeria Gigante and Professor Venkatasubramanian Ramasubramanian said in special presentations at an online “pre-meeting” of the European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases, which will be held April 15–18 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Dr. Aaron Glatt, chief of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital on Long Island, New York, told Fox News Digital that antibiotic resistance is one of the biggest problems in modern medicine.
“There aren’t many safe, effective, and cheap ways to treat many of these serious infections,” Glatt said.
“It is very important to look into new and different products.”
The release says that antimicrobial resistance is linked to about 5 million deaths every year.
Antimicrobial resistance hurts poor people more than it hurts rich people, according to the release. This is because the treatment for infections that are resistant to drugs involves newer agents that are more expensive than standard therapies.
According to 2019 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections happen every year in the U.S., and more than 35,000 people die as a result.”
CDC ISSUES ALERT ABOUT DRUG-RESISTANT STOMACH BUG’S SPREAD ” “When Clostridioides difficile, a bacterium that isn’t usually resistant but can cause diarrhea that kills and is linked to antibiotic use, is added to these, the total number of infections and deaths in the U.S. from all the threats in the report is more than 3 million and 48,000.”
Germs that are resistant to antibiotics and antifungal drugs are able to grow even though the drug is trying to kill them.
On its website, the CDC said, “It does not mean that our bodies are resistant to antibiotics or antifungals.”
A WHO review in 2021 found that 27 antibiotics are being tested against pathogens that WHO considers to be “critical.” These include two bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
“Pseudomonas and Acinetobacter are always the two bacteria that come up most often,” said Dr. Cameron Wolfe, an infectious disease specialist at Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina. “You could also add more drug-resistant forms of candida (yeast) infections to the list.”
There is also a “increasing number of environmental bacteria with really significant resistance,” he said. For example, Shigella has recently become very resistant to drugs, and Mycobacterium abscess is still spreading through municipal water.
But the WHO thinks that only a small number of the antibiotics that are in clinical trials right now are “innovative” enough to beat resistance.
“In the five years that this report covers, only 12 antibiotics have been approved, and only one of them, Cefiderocol, can kill all the pathogens that WHO considers to be critical,” said Gigante, team lead in WHO’s Antimicrobial Resistance Division in Geneva, Switzerland.
Experts are especially worried about one way that bacteria around the world are becoming more resistant to drugs. Some bacteria can get a gene that makes the New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 enzyme (NDM-1).
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This gene lets the bacteria become “resistant” by breaking down the “last line of defense” of a class of antibiotics called carbapenems, which treat a wide range of different bacteria and are often given after other antibiotics have failed.
Multiple reports say that most strains that get this gene are resistant to all commonly used antibiotics. This makes them a “superbug.”
The most common bacteria that make this gene are Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae, but the gene for NDM-1 can spread from one strain of bacteria to another, according to the release.
“You should only ever need an antibiotic for a short time, but you’ll need a cholesterol drug or an HIV antiviral for the rest of your life,” Wolfe said.
Experts say that drug companies need to put money into research and development to find an antimicrobial agent that will fight pathogens that are resistant to drugs.
But these drugs are just as likely to fail during this process as drugs for diseases like cancer and heart disease, which may give a much better return on investment.
Wolfe told Fox News Digital in an email that the problem is a mix of scientific difficulty (these are complex drug resistance mechanisms that often require very different drugs), regulatory complexity (the FDA approval path is long and very expensive, and the approval pathway is different in every country), and economics (it’s often cheaper to bring “me-too” drugs to the market than to try to completely redesign a new drug).
“Look at all the different statin drugs that are pretty much the same,” he said.
He kept going, “How many SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) drugs for depression are there that aren’t too different from each other? But companies can bet more on that space because having high cholesterol or depression doesn’t change in a way that hurts you.”
The last new class of antibiotics was found in the 1980s. The first antibiotic in this class, daptomycin, hit the market in 2003.
When antimicrobials are used too much or in the wrong way, resistance grows. The CDC says that about 28% of all antibiotic prescriptions written by doctors and in emergency rooms are for infections like colds and flu that don’t need antibiotics.
This means that about 47 million antibiotic prescriptions are written each year in the U.S.
There is also a trend around the world for pathogens to become resistant to antimicrobials much more quickly after they are used.
Between 1930 and 1950, it took an average of 11 years to build up resistance. However, between 1970 and 2000, it took only two to three years.
“Even though the United States has much less resistance to gram-negative infections than Low and Middle Income Countries (LMIC), it’s only a matter of time before global travel and clever bacteria catch up,” Ramasubramanian, president of the Clinical Infectious Diseases Society of India and Consultant in Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine at Apollo Hospitals in Chennai, India, told News Digital.
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