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Denmark announced on Thursday that it would create an international research center focused on combating antibiotic resistance, a plague that affects nearly 500,000 people worldwide.
Danish Health Minister Ellen Trane Norby signed a Memorandum of Understanding in Seattle, USA, with the international network of research centers, the CGIAR, to create the center, her office said .
Denmark wants to lead "future global work to find new solutions to the major challenges we face in antimicrobial resistance," said Norby.
The International Center for Interdisciplinary Solutions on Antimicrobial Resistance, funded by Denmark and private investors, will open in 2019 and is expected to employ up to 500 people.
In 2016, 490,000 people developed resistance to antibiotics, according to figures from the World Health Organization.
The growing problem causes 33,000 deaths every year in Europe, according to a recent study by the Stockholm-based European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). "The burden of these infections is comparable to that of the flu, TB and HIV / AIDS combined," said the ECDC.
Discovered in the 1920s, antibiotics saved tens of millions of lives by fighting bacterial diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and meningitis. But over the decades, bacteria have learned to defend themselves and develop resistance to the same drugs that have reliably defeated them.
The World Health Organization has repeatedly warned that the world lacked effective antibiotics and urged governments and major pharmaceutical companies in 2017 to create a new generation of drugs to combat ultra-viral supergerms. resistant.
Bacteria can become resistant when patients use antibiotics they do not need or complete, allowing the half-defeated bug to recover and boost its immunity.
AFP
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