Antibiotic resistance could cause more deaths than cancer in 25 years: Dutch professor
The number of bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics is increasing alarmingly worldwide. If nothing changes, more people will die from untreatable infections than from cancer within 25 years, Heiman Wertheim, a professor of Clinical Microbiology at Radboud University Medical Center and advisor to the World Health Organization, told De Gelderlander.
Without intervention, the number of hospital admissions, amputations, and deaths due to antibiotic-resistant bacteria will increase. Complex care, like organ transplants, may become impossible due to the involved risks becoming too high, Wertheim explained the worst-case scenarios.
Antimicrobial resistance - bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites becoming increasingly resistant to medications - is already putting extra pressure on the already strained healthcare system. “Where some infections used to be treatable with a pill, people now sometimes need an IV. You already see this happening, for example, with urinary tract infections in the elderly,” Wertheim said.
Over 700,000 people worldwide already die each year from infections caused by resistant pathogens. If nothing changes, a simple bladder infection could easily lead to a bloodstream infection, simply because the medications are no longer effective.
Due to this risk, the Netherlands is already very cautious about prescribing antibiotics. “But resistance knows no borders,” Moniek Pieters of the municipal health service GGD Gelderland-Zuid told the broadcaster. Other countries may be less careful with antibiotics, and the resistant bacteria will find their way to the Netherlands.
