No one questions that antibiotic resistance has risen in the last 20 years and has contributed to a substantial number of deaths.
But this is a high-level question, and it deserves a high-level answer.
Antibiotics prevent death and suffering from bacterial infections. That’s the criterion by which the effectiveness of antibiotic therapy should be judged. They don’t prevent infections, like vaccines and clean water, they cure or at least limit them. So one way to answer this question is to answer whether we are better or worse at curing serious infections than we were 20 years ago. We know the bugs have adapted to antibiotics. But humans can adapt too. How are we doing?
An increase in the rate of deaths from bacterial infectious diseases would be a tell that antibiotic therapy is beginning to fail us. Unfortunately, most of the CDCs statistics on infectious disease death rates are hard to interpret. “Lower respiratory infections” for instance, includes both bacterial and viral pneumonia. Same goes for diarrheal diseases.
But sepsis mortality is probably a good marker for antibiotic therapy effectiveness: it is prevalent enough to have a meaningful impact on public health (>1M cases/yr US); mortality rates are high; it is nearly always bacterial in origin; early and appropriate antibiotic therapy is crucial for successful treatment.
We should thus expect antibiotic resistance to have a big impact on sepsis mortality. The requirement for early treatment means that doctors have to treat with no microbiological data to guide their choice of antibiotics. Treating with an antibiotic rendered ineffective by resistance means that the “golden hour” has been lost, and outcomes will suffer accordingly.
Sepsis is a challenging disease to diagnose, and is often a complication of other diseases, so estimates of death rates vary. But I don’t think any studies have found that sepsis mortality is going up, as you would expect if antibiotic therapy is becoming less effective.
Here’s a meta-analysis covering 1992–2009:
From Two Decades of Mortality Trends among Patients with Severe Sepsis: A Comparative Meta-analysis
Here’s another study, covering 2009–2014:
From Incidence and Trends of Sepsis in US Hospitals, 2009-2014
And yet another, covering 2010–2015:
From Temporal Trends in Incidence, Sepsis-Related Mortality, and Hospital-Based Acute Care After Sepsis
These data aren’t dispositive, of course. Few things in healthcare ever are. Sepsis treatment doesn’t consist solely of antibiotic treatment, and we may be getting better at managing hypotension (although this is disputable) and other supportive care. And you could certainly argue (and would just as certainly be correct) that sepsis mortality would have fallen more if not for antibiotic resistance. A corollary of this argument is that maybe we just haven’t reached the tipping point yet, and further increases in resistance rates will send sepsis mortality rates skyrocketing.
All true. But the bottom line for now is that antibiotic therapy is at least as effective as it was twenty years ago.
How would anyone possibly accept this as actual data, there are multiple problems with this article;
First this article was written in February 2019, but the most recent chart has data from 2015, but the rest of it is older than that.
Also the sentence “Unfortunately, most of the CDCs statistics on infectious disease death rates are hard to interpret. “Lower respiratory infections” for instance, includes both bacterial and viral pneumonia. Same goes for diarrheal diseases.” How can you consider yourself knowledgeable in anything if you can’t understand basic statics presented by some of the most trusted resource for diseases.
Also you chose one specific bacterium infection, and one of the most deadly and aggressive bacterium infections. Patients with Sepsis have been given progressively stronger antibiotics because the bacterium has adapted and become resistant to multiple different antibiotic medications, which you didn’t even include.
In short, you are a joke and completely unknowledgeable about this topic.
Once you’ve graduated from high school…and then college… and then grad school and then spent a few years working in bioscience, you’ll begin to appreciate just how messy and complex most clinical studies really are. But then maybe you are just a troll and I am wasting my time here.