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antimicrobial resistance

Antimicrobial resistance has been described as a slow-moving pandemic for long enough that the phrase risks losing its force. It shouldn't. Global surveillance data continues to show resistant infections accounting for a growing share of hospital-acquired illness, and the pipeline of new antibiotics able to treat the most dangerous resistant organisms remains strikingly thin relative to the scale of the problem.

  • Gram-negative bacteria, including some strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, are of particular concern because they have an outer membrane that blocks many existing drug classes.
  • Carbapenem antibiotics, long treated as a last-resort class, are now facing resistance in a rising share of isolates in some regions.
  • Resistant infections are associated with longer hospital stays, higher treatment costs and higher mortality than infections caused by susceptible strains.

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