The Threat List

Status:Health

GlobalHealthDeep-sourcedmedium confidenceSourcing reviewed 2026-09-21

Antibiotic Pipeline Failure

Insufficient development and commercialization of new antibiotics is weakening the ability to treat drug-resistant bacterial infections. The supplied evidence indicates a substantial current health and economic burden from antimicrobial resistance and warns of much larger future losses if effective antibiotics remain unavailable.

Severity score

67.4

Critical · default weighting

Trajectory

Steady

How this is ranked

What this is

Score breakdown

Each factor is a 0–100 relative severity index, not the raw figure or a specific time period. The actual counts and periods are listed under "Standardized Impact" on the right.

Loss of life

65

Direct and attributable mortality, normalised across annual and cumulative tolls.

Lives negatively impacted

78

People displaced, injured, food-insecure, exposed or otherwise materially harmed.

Financial cost

82

Direct damage, lost output and health-system spend attributable to the event.

Environmental impact

20

Emissions, habitat and biodiversity loss, contamination and irreversibility.

Trajectory

90

Whether the situation is escalating, and how much worse it is plausibly getting.

Audit trail

Everything this entry has been through — when it was first searched for, queued, reviewed and approved, and how its figures and rank have moved since.

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