12 supergerms threaten world with incurable diseases

• World health organization (WHO) urged governments, scientists and pharma companies to create new drugs to tackle 12 antibiotics-resistant supergerms threatening an explosion of incurable disease.
• It has published a list of bacteria threatening to turn once easily-treatable infections into serial killers.
• The 12 bacteria types targeted by the WHO were prioritized based on the severity of disease they cause, how easily they spread, how many drugs still work against them and how many new ones are already being developed.

The list has three sections:
Critical

• These often are "gut" bacteria, found in the intestinal tract and spread by the fecal contamination of food, water or operating room equipment.
• These bugs usually affect people in intensive care units. They get into your bloodstream, causing very severe life-threatening infections, life-threatening pneumonia and very, very nasty wound infections that are very hard to treat.

High priority

• These are a grab bag of multidrug-resistant microbes including gonorrhea, staph infections and salmonella.  They spread very easily and we don't have any other way of preventing them.

Medium

• This category includes a flu bug and penicillin-resistant streptococcus bacteria. These microbes show significant resistance to antibiotics but are listed as "medium" priority because there are other options to deterring them, including immunization.

Analysis:

• The germs cause ailments including lung, blood, brain, and urinary tract infections, food poisoning from salmonella and sexually-transmitted gonorrhea.
• Bacteria can become resistant to drugs when people take incorrect doses of antibiotics. Resistant strains can also be contracted directly from animals, water and air, or other people.
• When the most common antibiotics fail to work, more expensive types must be tried, resulting in longer illness and treatment, often in hospital. Increasingly, cases are reported in which no existing drug works.
• The reasons included a lack of market incentives compared to treatments for chronic diseases, for example, which deliver a much higher return on investment.
• The list was meant to encourage governments to adopt policies and incentives to boost drug research and development by public and private entities.
   

By: Vishal