Antibiotic-resistant bacteria increasingly leaving children vulnerable to common infections, global study finds
Get the Health newsletter
Daily health & science — research, biotech, public health, the studies worth knowing. Free.
- Murdoch Children's Research Institute, with the University of Sydney, analyzed 106,581 infection samples from children up to age 18 across 82 countries and found antibiotic resistance increased in every region between 2004 and 2022; results were published Tuesday in JAMA.
- Klebsiella recorded the fastest resistance increase (notably in south-east Asia, eastern Europe and the western Pacific), while Acinetobacter baumannii — a sepsis- and pneumonia-causing bacterium with a tough double-membrane — already has the highest existing level of drug resistance.
- Statistical modelling projects resistance to last-line antibiotics will reach 82% for Acinetobacter baumannii and 35% for Klebsiella by 2035, according to the paper.
- Harry Booth, a 13-year-old Australian kidney transplant recipient, illustrates the human toll: his doctors must use less-common intravenous antibiotics because common ones no longer work against his recurrent chest and urinary tract infections.
- Co-author Penelope Bryant said children have been largely overlooked in AMR surveillance, leaving a lack of child-friendly antibiotic formulations and dosing guidelines — a gap she attributes to reluctance over pediatric trials and lower profitability for pharma.
- Chris Blyth, incoming president of the Australasian Society for Infectious Diseases, called the study "really important work" and said he is "frequently seeing children with difficult-to-treat infections" requiring more expensive, harder-to-administer drugs.
- The team launched the AMR in Kids website providing region- and pathogen-specific forecasts to 2035, while WHO's three-tier antibiotic framework (access, watch, reserve) underpins the researchers' finding that low-resource settings face a sharp rise in resistance to critical watch and reserve drugs even as high-income regions stabilize on first-line agents.
Why it matters: Pediatricians are already reaching for harder-to-get, more toxic antibiotics for routine childhood infections, and the study makes clear the burden is uneven — low-resource countries face the sharpest rise in resistance to the critical "watch" and "reserve" drugs that are supposed to be last-resort options. With 82% last-line resistance projected for Acinetobacter baumannii by 2035, treatment pipelines are narrowing fastest for children, where new-drug development is least profitable.
