While COVID-19 has garnered significant attention from the public and media, antibiotic resistance is a slow-moving threat to global health that is often overlooked even though the World Health Organization estimates that antibiotic-resistant infections could kill as many as 10 million people annually by 2050, according to news reports.
Sarah Fortune, John LaPorte Given Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases and chair of the Department of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, discussed the threat of drug-resistant bacteria and the scientific and economic challenges to creating new drugs in an October 1, 2020 Business Insider article.
“It’s increasingly likely that that bacterial infection will be very difficult to treat if not untreatable, and untreatable bacterial infections are bad. Untreatable bacterial infections do a lot of damage,” Fortune said. “They kill people.”
Read The Business Insider article: There’s another pandemic-level health threat slowly building — this one from bacteria