Bacterial illnesses that are resistant to available antibiotic medicines will cause more than 39 million deaths worldwide over the next 25 years and indirectly contribute to an additional 169 million deaths, according to a forecast published on Monday (Sept 16).

By 2050, annual death tolls attributed directly to antibiotic resistance, or associated with it, will reach 1.91 million and 8.22 million, respectively, if remediation measures are not in place, an international team of researchers reported in The Lancet.

Those annual numbers represent increases of nearly 68 per cent and 75 per cent per year, respectively, over death tolls directly and indirectly attributed to antibiotic resistance in 2022, the researchers with the Global Research on Antimicrobial Resistance Project wrote.

The increases will strain health systems and national economies and contribute to annual gross domestic product losses of US$1 trillion (S$1.29 trillion) to US$3.4 trillion by 2030, they predict.

The forecast of how the antibiotic resistance burden is likely to evolve was released ahead of a Sept 26 United Nations General Assembly High Level Meeting on the subject.

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