MUMBAI: Concern about growing global antibiotic resistance has come to a head: The World Health Organization is now warning that the world is running out of antibiotics.

There aren’t enough truly new antibiotics being developed, especially for the most concerning antibiotic-resistant infections, according to a WHO report released Tuesday.

The United Nations health agency has aired its concerns about antibiotic resistance, which makes it more difficult to treat infections, for some time. Some of the group’s latest moves included updating guidelines for treating sexually transmitted infections and cautioning that just three antibiotics are being developed to treat gonorrhea, a “fairly grim” situation.

“Antimicrobial resistance is a global health emergency that will seriously jeopardize progress in modern medicine,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general. Without more investment in research and development, “we will be forced back to a time when people feared common infections and risked their lives from minor surgery.”

The drug pipeline of new antibiotics under development are too and the existing ones are mere modifications of the older drugs, posing a grave threat towards fight against antimicrobial resistance, according to a new report released by the World Health Organisation. 

The WHO in its report titled Antibacterial agents in clinical development – an analysis of the antibacterial clinical development pipeline, including tuberculosis found that out of the 51 antibiotic drugs that arthat are under various clinical stages of discovery, only eight of them can be termed as novel solutions limiting the treatment options for the antibiotic resistant infections identified by WHO as the greatest threat to health.