A study recently published in The Lancet looks at how antimicrobial resistant bacteria is now becoming a major problem in modern society and is projected to only get worse. While only looking at fatalities from 2019, the researchers found that around 1.27 million deaths were associated with antimicrobial medicine resistance. Although this phenomenon of the emergence of bacteria which are resistant to antimicrobial medicines is a known fact, the number of directly caused deaths and projections death tolls in the future was mostly speculative before the comprehensive study compiled by over 50 collaborators. According to the researchers who conducted the study, the four leading pathogens which currently are of concern due to the resistance that they can posses are Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Acinetobacter baumannii. Most worrying is MSRA or Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus, which the scientists found was responsible for more than 100,000 deaths in 2019. In the future, current research indicates that bacteria with antimicrobial resistance could kill as many as HIV and malaria currently do.

The resistance these bacteria are gaining are occurring because when a patient is treated with antimicrobial medicine, bacteria with random mutations which give it resistance to the medicine are able to survive, while the less resistant variants of the bacteria are killed off by the medicine. The resistant variant of the bacteria then spread, eventually becoming more and more prevalent and harder to deal with. This resistance is caused by overuse of antibacterial medicines which are used in many key procedures, such as surgery or other invasive operations. As bacteria gain further resistance, these procedures get riskier to do, as antimicrobials used are rendered ineffective. While the obvious solution is to produce new antibacterial medicines, it will be only a matter of time until strains of bacteria emerge that are resistant to the new antibacterial, so more systemic changes in how antimicrobials are used need to be implemented, such as more limited usage of medicines.