The threat of antibiotic resistance continues to grow in 2022. Reporters looking for new angles on how to cover this brewing danger can look to efforts by public health advocates, drug company leaders and federal legislators, who are pushing for federal policies that encourage the development of new antibiotics. Their efforts come as two recent reports demonstrate that another potential global infectious disease crisis is percolating.
One January 2022 report concluded that 1.2 million deaths globally were the result of drug resistance in 2019 — higher than previously understood. Another showed that the pipeline of new antibiotics to replace those that no longer work remains dangerously thin and likely won’t expand unless the federal government steps in like it did during COVID-19 with vaccines.
“Among the many sobering reminders of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the critical importance of public health preparedness,” Kathy Talkington, director of health programs at Pew Charitable Trusts, wrote in a Feb. 3 letter to a U.S. Senate committee in support of legislation to spur the development of new antibiotics. “While we were not aware of COVID-19 before its emergence, experts have been warning for decades about the threat of antibiotic resistance … Yet, their value to health care has been taken for granted; all the while, their effectiveness gradually diminishes.”
The CDC estimated in 2019 that about 35,000 people a year in the U.S. die from a drug-resistant infection, which is up from 2013 when the agency estimated about 21,000 were dying annually from a superbug. This is the latest national data available from the CDC.
