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by GuB-42 1895 days ago
I often hear how bad antibiotic resistant bacteria may be but how much of a pandemic potential do they have?

It seems that once you remove the antibiotic, the resistant strain is quickly outcompeted by the one that is not. And it seems to match the fact that you typically find resistant strains in places with lots of antibiotics, like hospitals and countries where people and livestock are given antibiotics when they shouldn't, but not that much elsewhere.

1 comments

I suppose we don't know exactly where it will end, but we do know that lots of strains are constantly developing resistance to more and more forms of antibiotics, and that it gets progressively more expensive to develop new antibiotics that still work.

According to wikipedia: "According to World Health Organization (WHO) estimates, three hundred and fifty million deaths could be caused by AMR by 2050"

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance )

If true, that would be >10million per year, on average, or 3x what covid has been doing over the last year.