Sepsis occurs when one’s immune system has an extreme response to an infection. It’s a life-threatening condition: globally, it accounts for about 11 million deaths – 20% of all deaths per year. And it doesn’t just affect adults.
In 2020, 2.4 million newborn babies died of sepsis in the first month of their lives. Most of these deaths happened in sub-Saharan Africa.
The main treatment for sepsis is antibiotics. However, the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in human medicine and agriculture has led to antimicrobial resistance – a process in which bacteria, fungi and parasites have developed the ability to resist the action of medicines. The World Health Organization describes antimicrobial resistance as one of the top global public health and development threats.
This growing resistance is due to the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in both human medicine and in farming. They’re used in large quantities to grow crops and in animal feeds to treat and reduce the risk of infection in livestock. It has been forecast that, by 2050, more people will die from antimicrobial resistance than both cancer and diabetes combined.
Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the regions with the highest rates of deaths associated with antimicrobial resistance (including sepsis) in the world, with 23.5 deaths per 100,000 people. In our latest study we found that samples taken from mothers and newborn babies younger than one week in Nigeria already had colistin-resistant bacteria present in thei.