The World Health Organization’s 2014 report on antimicrobial resistance makes for sober reading.1 In more than 200 pages, the organization details the significant challenges that confront healthcare systems seeking to mitigate the risks of an environment that is increasingly resistant to our best medicines. Following are a select few of the dire takeaway messages from the WHO report.

Unless immediate action is taken, says the WHO report, the world is headed for a postantibiotic era where infections that were once treatable will turn deadly. Disease-causing bacteria share their evolving genes at such a galloping pace that there is an emerging global health security threat, painting a postapocalyptic image of a world sent back to the preantibiotic era, where a routine cut or infection could be deadly.

There is widespread resistance to the treatment of last resort for life-threatening infections caused by Klebsiella pneumoniae, common intestinal bacteria. K. pneumoniae is responsible for a number of hospital-acquired infections, including pneumonia, bloodstream infections, and infections in newborns and patients in intensive care. In some countries, the treatment of last resort for K. pneumoniae infections—carbapenem antibiotics—would not work in more than half of patients.

According to the report, resistance to fluoroquinolones, the most widely used antibiotic to treat urinary tract infections caused by E. coli, is “very widespread.” In some countries, this treatment is ineffective in more than half of patients.

Resistance to the treatment of last resort for gonorrhea—third-generation cephalosporins—has been found in Australia, Canada, Japan, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, the UK, and parts of Eastern and Western Europe. Each day, more than one million people contract gonorrhea around the world, the WHO report says.

Resistance to antibiotics also prolongs illness and increases the risk of death. According to the WHO report, patients who have contracted methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) are 64% more likely to die than patients with a nonresistant form of the infection.

In the Americas, there are high levels of E. coli resistance to two common antibiotics: third-generation cephalosporins and fluoroquinolones. “In some settings,” the report says, “as many as 90% of Staphylococcus aureus infections are reported to be methicillin-resistant (MRSA), meaning treatment with standard antibiotics does not work.”

REFERENCE

  1. Antimicrobial resistance: global report on surveillance, 2014 summary. Geneva: World Health Organization, 2014. Available at: http://www.who.int/drugresistance/documents/surveillancereport/en. Accessed February 24, 2015.