Fight Against Future Supergerms Heats Up

“It’s hard even to keep health as a priority,” Krishnamoorthy said. “People are like, ‘Let’s move on and look at other issues.”

But the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that drug-resistant infections already affect more than 2.8 million Americans per year and kill about 35,000 per year.

Amanda Jezek, a vice president at the Infectious Disease Society of America, said during a panel discussion that six drug-resistant pathogens cause about $4 billion in U.S. hospital bills per year.

America’s Health Insurance Plans, a group for health insurers, has been active in efforts to support the fight against antimicrobial resistance and put out a paper on the topic in 2019.

Drug cost: Ramanan Laxminarayan, the epidemiologist who serves as the director of One Health Trust, a Washington-based public health organization, argued that policymakers have to think harder about research funding strategies that can cut new antibiotics’ prices.

The current drug development process costs an average of more than $1.5 billion per drug, and that’s why the typical new antibiotic costs more than $10,000 per patient treated, Laxminarayan said.

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