Top 5 Deadly Bacteria That Killed Nearly 6.8 Lakh Indians in 2019

Can bacteria kill you? Looks like it could. Bacterial infections caused by 5 deadly bacteria were responsible for at least 6.8 lakh deaths in India in 2019.

Bacterial infections were found to be the reason behind at least 6.8 lakh deaths in 2019 in India, finds a new study.

Infections remain a leading cause of death globally and in India, and this might come as a surprise as five bacteria were found responsible for these deaths, a new Lancet study has revealed.

Top Five Deadly Bacteria in India

The five deadly bacteria in India, that were found responsible for the infections were E.coli, along with S. pneumoniae, K. pneumoniae, S. aureus and A. baumanii.

Mechanism of Development of Antibiotic Resistance Identified
Physicists at McMaster University have for the first time identified a simple mechanism used by potentially deadly bacteria against various antibiotics

‘Dangerous bacteria like E.coli, S. pneumoniae, K. pneumoniae, S. aureus. and A. baumanii claimed almost 6.8 lakh lives in India in 2019.’
Read More..

E. Coli alone claimed at least 1.6 lakh lives in India in 2019.

Globally, there were 77 lakh deaths associated with 33 bacterial pathogens (both resistant and susceptible to antimicrobials) across 11 infectious syndromes.

"The 33 bacterial pathogens that we investigated in this study are a substantial source of health loss globally, with considerable variation in their distribution across infectious syndromes and locations," said the Lancet study.

Need for Strategies to Prevent Bacterial Infections

The researchers stated that, “they should be considered an urgent priority for intervention within the global health community. Strategies to address the burden of bacterial infections include infection prevention, optimized use of antibiotics, improved capacity for microbiological analysis, vaccine development, and improved and more pervasive use of available vaccines,”.

Natural Antibiotics to Fight Bacterial Infections
Fighting infections the natural way and preventing them is always more effective than consuming medicines and antibiotics to treat them.

The researchers estimated deaths associated with 33 bacterial genera or species across 11 infectious syndromes in 2019 using methods from the Global Burden of Diseases (GBD), Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2019, in addition to a subset of the input data described in the Global Burden of Antimicrobial Resistance 2019 study.

This study included 343 million individual records or isolates covering 11,361 study-location-years.

Your Sink Could Expose You to 2 Types of Deadly Bacteria
Dangerous biofilms are easily created in the U-bend of the sink and are considered to be the perfect environment for hundreds of lethal bacteria to thrive.

From an estimated 13.7 million infection-related deaths in 2019, there were 7.7 million deaths associated with the 33 bacterial pathogens (both resistant and susceptible to antimicrobials) across the 11 infectious syndromes estimated in this study.

Five leading pathogens

-- Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa -- were responsible for 54.9 percent of deaths among the investigated bacteria.

Immunotherapy Could Fight Deadly Bacterial Infections
A new way to use immunotherapy to treat deadly bacterial infections as well as destroy cancer cells has been discovered.

"The age-standardized mortality rate associated with these bacterial pathogens was highest in the sub-Saharan Africa super-region, with 230 deaths per 100a%000 population," said the study.

S. aureus was the leading bacterial cause of death in 135 countries and was also associated with most deaths in individuals older than 15 years, globally.

Among children younger than 5 years, S pneumonia was the pathogen associated with most deaths.

"In 2019, more than 6 million deaths occurred as a result of three bacterial infectious syndromes, with lower respiratory infections and bloodstream infections each causing more than 2 million deaths and peritoneal and intra-abdominal infections causing more than 1 million deaths," the study noted.

Source-IANS