The GRAM paper gives face to the AMR crisis - Vaxdyn’s comment about the GRAM paper

The experts of the Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR) world, including Vaxdyn’s researchers, have been warning about the entrance into a post-antibiotic era or the occurrence of a silent pandemic for years. However, the general public, including health practitioners, did not understand the message or underscored the magnitude of the problem.

Recently, a vast network of AMR experts around the world, including bacteriologists, epidemiologists, data analysts, and public health managers, funded by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, The Wellcome Trust, and the UK government, published in The Lancet what it is known as the GRAM paper*. The GRAM paper is the most comprehensive study about the global incidence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The relevance of this study is that finally gives a clear face, based on data, to the AMR crisis. A face that everybody can look at now and rapidly understand the magnitude of the problem.

That face says that within a year -the study analyzed 2019, the last pre-pandemic year- almost 5 million people lost their life in the world with a syndrome associated with an infection produced by an antibiotic-resistance bacteria. The killing doubles the official deaths per year due to Covid-19. The most burdensome infectious syndrome, taking alone 1.5 million lives, was pneumonia.  Six bacteria alone took 73% of all those lives. The names of the killers are the Gram-negative bacteria Acinetobacter baumannii, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Escherichia coli, and the Gram-positive bacteria Staphylococcus aureus and Streptococcus pneumoniae. There is vaccine available only against one of these killers (S. pneumoniae). The GRAM paper also gives details about the human populations and the regions of the world most severely impacted by the AMR crisis. The paper clearly shows that the crisis is global, though, affecting all of us. This is the loudest scream claiming for help from all stakeholders.