The report by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control said that reported cases of two highly drug-resistant pathogens increased in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and then increased sharply in 2021. The increase came from cases in hospital intensive care units and in European Union countries where antimicrobial-resistant infections were already widespread, ECDC official Dominique Monnet told a news conference. The data showed that in Europe last year, reported cases of the Acinetobacter group of bacteria more than doubled compared to annual numbers before the pandemic. Cases of another bacterium, Klebsiella pneumoniae, which is resistant to antibiotics of last resort, increased by 31% in 2020 and by 20% in 2021. The report did not include data on how many people died from the infections in 2020 and 2021. Experts say it can be difficult to definitively attribute a cause of death when patients were hospitalized with, for example, COVID-19. Some scientists have linked the increase in hospital-acquired superbug infections during the pandemic to broader antibiotic prescriptions to treat COVID-19 and other bacterial infections during long hospital stays. Monnet said that was “the most plausible hypothesis,” but his agency had not yet conducted a thorough analysis. He also said the data showed reductions in cases of other common superbugs in European hospitals. ECDC believes this is because the COVID crisis has led to business being postponed. The European report is in line with a trend seen last year in the United States, where government data showed US deaths from drug-resistant infections rose 15% in 2020. Drug resistance develops through misuse or overuse of antibiotics. Concerns about this are not new. Experts call supermicrobial infections, including fungal pathogens, a silent pandemic that causes more than a million deaths a year but garners little research attention or funding. Report by Maggie Fick. edited by Barbara Lewis Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
