September 17, 2024
In Smithsonian Magazine, “Developing new antibiotics will help tackle the problem, potentially averting millions of deaths, per the paper. But improving access to those drugs is also necessary. Deaths from antimicrobial resistance will also affect regions of the world differently, with South Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa likely to be hit the hardest, according to the study. Those low-resource regions also face a lack of access to quality health care, including antibiotics.
‘Drug resistance is not their primary issue [in low-access regions]—their primary issue is bacterial infections itself,’ says Ramanan Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist at One Health Trust.”