According to the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, superbugs will kill someone every three seconds by 2050 unless the world acts now.

The global review sets out a plan for preventing medicine “being cast back into the dark ages” that requires billions of dollars of investment.

The report also calls for a revolution in the way antibiotics are used and a massive campaign to educate people.

It has received a mixed response with some concerned that it does not go far enough.

The battle against infections that are resistant to drugs is one the world is losing rapidly and has been described as “as big a risk as terrorism”.

The problem is that we are simply not developing enough new antibiotics and we are wasting the ones we have.

Since the review started in mid-2014, more than one million people have died from such infections.

In that time doctors also discovered bacteria that can shrug off the drug of last resort – colistin – leading to warnings that the world was teetering on the cusp of a “post-antibiotic era”.

The report says the situation will get only worse with 10 million people predicted to die every year from resistant infections by 2050.

The analysis was based on scenarios modeled by researchers Rand Europe and auditors KPMG.

They found that drug resistant E. coli, malaria and tuberculosis (TB) would have the biggest impact.

The financial cost to economies of drug resistance will add up to $100 trillion by the mid-point of the century.

The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance said the economic case for action “was clear” and could be paid for using a small cut of the current health budgets of countries or through extra taxes on pharmaceutical companies not investing in antibiotic research.