AMR: ‘The silent pandemic’ — The state of antimicrobial resistance in medicine

Antimicrobial resistance is an issue that affects many different parts of medicine. It also has led to patient deaths, with more projected around the world in coming years. Jason G. Newland, MD, MEd, is division chief of infectious diseases for Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. Here he opens discussion to explain the scope and scale of the problem.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Medical Economics: Can you discuss the current state of medicine and research regarding antimicrobial resistance, and how would you describe the scope and scale of the problem?

Jason G. Newland, MD, MEd: Antimicrobial resistance is an important, we'll say concept or thing that is impacting all of us, whether you might know it or not. So what we mean by this is that we have a lot of pathogens, like bacteria, one might have heard of staphaureus or MRSA, as well as even viruses like influenza and even parasites, maybe people have heard of malaria. And all of these, those specifically, all have kind of medicines or antibiotics for bacteria or antivirals for influenza or antimalarials, for parasites, for the malaria, and those medicines can treat them, and they have made people healthy for a century, and that's really important. But what we have seen in the use of them is that we develop — those pathogens are living organisms that can change, and they evolve. And in that evolution, they're like, look, something's trying to kill me. I change so that they don't kill me. And that is where we are, that antimicrobial resistance impact. And what we have seen in the United States, and that in 2019 report from the CDC, that 35,000 Americans die annually, again, die annually from an antimicrobial resistant infection, which are predominantly bacteria in origin. We know that worldwide data suggests that by 2050 we'll have annually, so every year, we'll have 11 million deaths worldwide due to antimicrobial resistance, and that's at a more global scale, with more pathogens. So to say we're not in a state that scares us in medicine would be an understatement.