Drug-resistant infections kill almost 1.3m people a year
Rumina hasan peers at a sample of bacteria taken from a three-day-old baby suffering from fever and fits. What she sees in her laboratory in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, is alarming. The bugs causing the illness–Serratia marcescens–are resistant to every antibiotic available. Meanwhile at a hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital, Jobayer Chisti struggles to save a one-month-old from pneumonia caused by drug-resistant Klebsiella. This bug would be remarkable in Britain or America, where most cases of bacterial pneumonia are easily cured by antibiotics. But 77% of the infections treated by Dr Chisti’s team between 2014 and 2017 involved drug-resistant bacteria.
