Super microbes that are resistant to antibiotics kill 700,000 people every year, claim participants of the roundtable discussion “Antibiotic resistance: the past, the present and the future” that took place at the Kliment Timiryazev Biology Museum.
Biology Museum Director Maria Rakhcheyeva said that since the invention of antibiotics in 1928, bacteria have been gradually growing resistant to drugs thus posing a new challenge.
“Just like us and any live creature on the planet, bacteria want to live and fight for their lives. They evolve really fast and acquire resistance to antibiotics. There are even multidrug-resistant bacteria,” the expert commented.
Roman Kozlov, doctor of medical sciences and President of the Interregional Association of Clinical Microbiology and Antibacterial Chemotherapy, said that by 2050, the global GDP will fall by 7%, or $210 trillion, due to inefficient antibiotics.
“These figures are striking. The issue was raised at the UN General Assembly,” he added. “Even worse, antibiotics are highly unprofitable. It takes 23 years for pharmaceutical companies to start making profit from newly developed antibiotics. Therefore, the number of antibiotics developers has gone down drastically, from 18 companies in the 1990s to only five in the early 2000s.”