COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on the world for the past two years, but there’s a potentially deadlier threat creeping across the globe right now that hardly anyone is talking about. According to a recent report in the medical journal The Lancet, drug-resistant bacterial infections were linked to five million deaths worldwide in 2019. According to a UK government study, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) could kill ten million people annually by the year 2050. Moreover, as with COVID-19, drug-resistant bacterial infections aren’t equitable, and poor and marginalized populations are the hardest hit, both in North America and around the globe. TRNN correspondent David Kattenburg speaks with Dr. Shira Doron and Dr. Tomislav Meštrović about the growing AMR crisis, why it has garnered so little public attention, and what can be done to address it.

Dr. Shira Doron is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Tufts University and the Director of the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at Tufts Medical Center. In 2021, Dr. Doron co-authored a letter to the journal Nature Medicine entitled “Antibiotic Resistance: A Call to Action to Prevent the Next Epidemic of Inequality.” Dr. Tomislav Meštrović is a medical doctor and clinical microbiologist, and an associate professor at University North in Croatia. He’s also a scholar at the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

Read the transcript of this podcast: https://therealnews.com/like-covid-a-crisis-of-drug-resistant-bacterial-infections-is-hurting-the-poor-and-marginalized-most

Pre-Production/Studio: David Kattenburg
Post-Production: Adam Coley

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