The American Heritage Dictionary “plagues”

1. A highly infectious, usually fatal, epidemic disease; a pestilence.
2. A virulent, infectious disease that is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis (syn. Pasteurella pestis) and is transmitted primarily by the bite of fleas from an infected rodent, especially a rat. In humans it occurs in bubonic form, marked by lymph node enlargement, and in pneumonic form, marked by infection of the lungs, and can progress to septicemia.
3. A widespread affliction or calamity seen as divine retribution.

Important Takeaways:

• Why humans are losing the race against superbugs
• Drug-resistant bacteria — also known as superbugs — are on the rise globally, and they’re now killing more people each year than either HIV/AIDS or malaria. And low- and middle-income countries are being hit the hardest by the rise in antibiotic-resistant infections.
• “That resistance out there is actually now one of the leading causes of death in the world,” says Dr. Chris Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation Murray is one of the authors of a new study, published in the medical journal The Lancet, that finds that in 2019, drug-resistant infections directly killed 1.2 million people and played a role in 5 million more deaths worldwide. Murray and his colleagues set out to quantify how much of a problem antibiotic resistance is globally, and they found that bacteria are mutating to evade antibiotics at a pace far faster than many researchers had previously forecast.
• These deadly new strains of bacteria are causing untreatable blood infections, fatal pneumonia, relentless urinary tract infections, gangrenous wounds and terminal cases of sepsis, among other conditions.
• Murray says this new study shows it happening all over the world.

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