Superbugs are worse than Covid. “Every year, in the world, infections due to antibiotic resistant bacteria kill more than TB and AIDS combined. It is estimated that worldwide, deaths from resistant bacteria are five million a year, and it is an unstoppable growth If we continue like this, some microorganisms will soon be out of weapons.” Rino Rappuoli, scientific director of the Siena Biotechnopole and coordinator of the Mad – Lab (Monoclonal Antibody Discovery) of the Toscana Life Sciences Foundation, recalls this in the pages of the weekly ‘Panorama’.
Bacterial resistance should make us very scared, according to the expert. For Covid, in three years, “the deaths – at least the confirmed ones – have been six million, and Sars-CoV-2 is decreasing the mortality rate”. According to an English study, in 2016, “if nothing is done to prevent it, by 2050 the deaths from resistant bacteria will exceed those from cancer. And this was said when the victims were 700,000 a year”. Today, among the advancing diseases, “there are strains of typhoid that are now impossible to cure, from Pakistan they are traveling around the world and nothing can be done about it, the only way to stop them is a vaccine. During my previous experience at the GSK Vaccine Institute for Global Health of Siena we have created one for typhus used today in Nepal, for children up to nine years old”.
WHO and CDC, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have made a list of the most fearsome bacteria. “Among those that worry us, in addition to typhus, there is gonococcus: in the forties it was sensitive to almost everything, now there is only one effective antibiotic left, if even that no longer works we have run out of possible therapies. Another very bacterium resistant is staphylococcus, there are cases everywhere, even in Italy. And then the family of enterobacteria, such as klebsiella, which we had in Pisa but a little everywhere, and pseudomonas”.