Experts at B·Debate warn of lack of new antibiotics to fight infection

Every year, some 700,000 people in the world die of drug-resistant bacterial infections and the figure is expected to hit 10 million by 2050. Top international experts in microbiology and infectious diseases are meeting from November 12 to 14 to find new solutions to this issue, brought together by B·Debate, an initiative of Biocat and “la Caixa”, and co-organized by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal) on this occasion.

The event is taking place just a few days before World Antibiotic Awareness Week, from November 18 to 24, promoted by the World Health Organization (WHO). According to this body, antibiotic resistance is one of three global health threats. In Spain alone, 29,000 people die each year of infections caused by multi-resistant pathogens. This is 30 times more that the number of deaths in traffic accidents.

This B·Debate session is the second that has looked at this issue. In 2013, the organizers identified this public-health issue and proposed an event to debate it. Two years later, they published an article in the journal New Microbes and New Infections and now they want to return to this topic in a new debate session to share strategies for finding new antibiotics.

This B·Debate session aims to provide a general overview of new strategies being developed, including the design, research and development of new anti-microbial agents to fight the resistance of bacteria today. Additionally, the leaders of the debate have just published a revision with the strategies for developing new drugs that have proven to be most successful.

The full program for the B·Debate session “Reversing a dystopian future. New strategies to discover antibacterial agents” is available here.