- Antibiotic resistance makes these diseases more difficult to treat.

E. coli, escherichia coli

Bacterial infections are already the second cause of death in the world

We are surrounded by bacteria. They are in the ground we walk on, in the food we eat, and in the water we drink. They live inside of us. Most of the time, our coexistence with these tiny beings is peaceful; some are even beneficial to us. But there is a small group among them that can cause us certain problems; in fact, infections caused by only 33 species together constitute the second cause of death in the world, only behind cardiovascular diseases.

This is the conclusion of an article published in the prestigious scientific journal The Lancet, which, based on data from the 2019 Global Burden of Diseases and the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance, has estimated that 7.7 million deaths in 2019, before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, were directly caused by this group of pathogens. This figure is equivalent to one in eight deaths worldwide.

More than 80% of the deadly load of pathogens

The authors of the work, they explain, selected these 33 species because they account for more than 80% of the fatal burden of all pathogens. This is interesting because most of them are not species with high mortality: rather, they are ubiquitous.

On the other hand, it must be taken into account that resistance to antibiotics that many strains of these species are developing is also contributing to this growing lethal burden, making it especially difficult to treat, especially in nosocomial cases (which originate in hospital spaces).

Another aspect that they attended to is the type of infection, specifically selecting eleven types (among them, those of the lower respiratory tract, of the bloodstream, or gastrointestinal).

This is the first time that global estimates have been made of the deaths that occur worldwide due to these pathogens, and for this reason, the results seem to conflict with data such as those of the WHO, which place cancer in the same place of the sinister ranking.

References

GBD 2019 Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators. Global mortality associated with 33 bacterial pathogens in 2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019. The Lancet (2022). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)02185-7.