WHO warns of diseases that will soon be untreatable

SUPERBUGS which cause sepsis, pneumonia, and salmonella will soon be resistant to antibiotics, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has warned as it called on governments to stop relying on pharmaceutical companies to solve the crisis.

Health officials have drawn up a list of 12 types of bacteria which pose the “greatest threat to human health” because soon no drugs will be able to fight them off. Experts have previously warned that resistance to the drugs used to fight infections could cause a bigger threat to mankind than cancer.

If antibiotics lose their effectiveness, key medical procedures – including organ transplantation, Caesarean sections and chemotherapy – could become too dangerous to perform. Around 700,000 people around the world die annually due to drug-resistant infections and, if no action is taken, it has been estimated that such infections will kill 10 million people a year by 2050.

The bacteria on the list can cause severe and often deadly infections such as bloodstream infections and pneumonia and the most critical group includes multi-drug resistant bacteria that pose a particular threat in hospitals and nursing homes.

Other increasingly drug-resistant bacteria, which are deemed “high” and “medium” priority, cause more common diseases such as gonorrhoea and food poisoning caused by salmonella.

The WHO said that it hoped the list would spur governments to put in place policies to incentivise the development of new drugs.