Global burden of antimicrobial resistance: essential pieces of a global puzzle

Christopher J L Murray and colleagues highlight the global impact of the silent antimicrobial resistance (AMR) pandemic. The applied methodology is more thorough than previous efforts, but there are a number of important limitations.

The basic building block for the complex modelling exercise is the fraction of sepsis and infectious syndromes among all deaths, which was based on data from only 16 of 204 countries, with more than 60% of the data coming from the USA. This type of data might not be the most suitable entry point for AMR burden estimation.