Antimicrobial Resistance Responsible for Over Half a Million Deaths in the Americas: Study

Bacterial antimicrobial resistance falls into the WHO’s top 10 threats to humanity. A study reveals how much this deadly problem affects the Americas.

C. diff is a bacterium with a hospitalization rate of about 50 percent and carries a list of symptoms including diarrhea, fever, and stomach tenderness or pain. Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock

Over half a million deaths spanning 35 countries were tied to bacterial antimicrobial resistance (AMR), according to what researchers are calling the most comprehensive AMR burden analysis assessing this particular part of the world. This number has global health officials on edge, considering the growing problem is listed as one of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) top 10 public health threats facing humanity.

The large study, recently published in The Lancet Regional Health–Americas, drew from multiple international sources that provided data from all 35 countries of the WHO Region of the Americas for 23 bacterial pathogens and 88 pathogen-drug combinations.

Deaths Associated With AMR

Analyses revealed bacterial AMR played a role in killing 569,000 people in 2019, representing 11.5 percent of all global AMR-associated deaths. In other words, drug-resistant infections were partly responsible, but there may have been a separate, underlying main cause of death. An additional 141,000 deaths were directly caused by AMR. This number makes up just over 11 percent of all global AMR deaths.