Drug-resistant “superbugs” have now spread to every corner of the world, threatening to make diseases like gonorrhea and tuberculosis more difficult — or even impossible — to treat, according to the World Health Organization’s first global survey of antibiotic resistance .

“Increasingly, governments around the world are beginning to pay attention to a problem so serious that it threatens the achievements of modern medicine,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health security, in the report’s foreword.

“A post-antibiotic era — in which common infections and minor injuries can kill — far from being an apocalyptic fantasy, is instead a very real possibility for the 21st century.”

The problem of drug resistance is causing alarm around the world, with high-profile public health officials warning it could lead to the “ end of modern medicine as we know it .” While the WHO released a strategy for controlling antimicrobial resistance in 2001, this is its first international survey of the problem and the most comprehensive global snapshot to date, Fukuda said in a press conference Wednesday.

“Overall the picture is very clear,” he said. “What we’re seeing is that the capacity to treat serious infections is really becoming less in all parts of the world.

“The bottom line is we should expect to see that there are going to be some people who simply have untreatable infections,” he later added. “We should anticipate to see more deaths and we should also anticipate to see higher costs.”

Antibiotic resistance occurs when a bacterium develops the ability to overcome the drugs that can kill them. Other disease-causing microbes — like viruses, parasites and fungi — can also evolve to become resistant to antiviral or antifungal medications.

While drug resistance is a naturally occurring phenomenon — resistance to penicillin, the world’s first widely used antibiotic, had already emerged by the early 1940s — the process has been dramatically accelerated by man-made pressures, such as the overuse of antibiotics in both people and animals.

Making matters worse, the drug pipeline for new antibiotics is also running dry — no new classes of antibiotics have been discovered since the late 1980s.

The WHO report found that resistance in many common bacteria, like E. coli and salmonella, have “reached alarming levels in many parts of the world.” This is resulting in an “accelerating global health emergency” and the treatments are failing for everything from bladder infections to pneumonia.

“When we look at some of the most common infections — so, for example, urinary tract infections or in some instances diarrhea infections — we really are beginning to run out of medicines that can be taken by mouth,” Fukuda said. “(This) is of course a much easier route and it’s a different thing to have to go into the hospital or to get injectable antibiotics.”

Nearly half of all countries reported cases of drug-resistant E.coli, the report found. Gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted disease that can cause infertility, is also showing resistance everywhere from Japan to Canada and “may become untreatable unless new drugs become available.” Indeed, untreatable gonorrhea has already been reported in 10 countries, Fukuda said.

The report also warns that drug resistance is rolling back progress on major global killers like HIV, malaria and tuberculosis — diseases that disproportionately affect the developing world. In 2012, multidrug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, which can require more than 20 months of treatment, caused an estimated 450,000 cases, the WHO report said.

Another alarming finding is that strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae resistant to the strongest-available drugs have now been identified in most countries that provided data to the WHO. This particularly nasty bacterium can kill up to half of its victims and belongs to a family of germs recently described as “nightmare bacteria” by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Fukuda warned that antibiotic resistance not only hampers the ability to treat common infections, it also threatens modern-day medical procedures. If antibiotics fail, premature babies will be harder to keep alive and surgeries — everything from heart transplants to hip replacements and Caesarean section — become more dangerous.

“We rely upon these medicines to protect people when they are most vulnerable,” Fukuda said. “It means that when people develop cancer, and are on chemotherapy and become immuno-compromised, they are at much higher risk for complications and infections.”

And while antibiotic resistance means worse outcomes for patients, it also has “disturbing” economic consequences, according to the report; in the U.S., it’s been estimated to cost the healthcare system as much as $34 billion per year.

The WHO report, while alarming, is only an incomplete snapshot of the problem. Many countries are failing to track the problem and only 22 countries provided surveillance data for the nine priority bacteria identified by the WHO.

“We need better monitoring around the world of the key trends,” Fukuda said. “There are major public health gaps in the ability to simply monitor what’s going on. This is something we hope to see change quickly over the next few years.”

Fukuda said the report is a call to action, not only for health agencies but also governments, pharmaceutical companies, the agricultural industry and patients, who need to be better educated on the problem.

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Dr. Gerry Wright, an expert on antibiotic resistance and director of McMaster University’s infectious disease institute, welcomes the WHO’s report, which he hopes will finally galvanize serious action against antibiotic resistance.

“It’s probably the biggest threat to modern medicine that I can think of,” he said. “Without them, there is no modern medicine. It’s just as simple as that.”

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