‍The World Health Organization released a new list of the world's deadliest superbugs Monday. The WHO also said new antibiotics must be developed urgently to battle the "priority pathogens". 

Overnight, the WHO published its first-ever list of antibiotic-resistant diseases, a catalogue of 12 families of bacteria that are known to pose the greatest threat to human health, with the "most critical group" including "multidrug-resistant" bacteria such as acinetobacter, pseudomonas and various enterobacteriaceae. 

"This WHO list is very important to help pharmaceutical companies, researchers, drug regulators and governments to help set priorities for research to find new drug classes to treat life-threatening infections where there are few, and in some cases no, antibiotics to treat these infections," professor Peter Collignon at the Australian National University said on Tuesday. 

"Antibiotic resistance is an ever-growing problem. In the developing world half of some common infections such as E.coli are now untreatable with available agents. 

"The most resistant bacteria presently are acinetobacter and pseudomonas plus bowel bacteria such as E.coli and klebsiella. The WHO list gives appropriate priority to the different bacteria."

"These bacteria are deadly, are difficult to cure, and spread easily between people and animals. Most importantly, they are resistant to the antibiotics that we normally use to kill bacterial infections," Michael Gillings from Macquarie University said.

"Developing new antibiotics is expensive, and often not profitable. However, the WHO hopes that this statement will stimulate much needed research and development of next generation antibiotics." 

China has been identified as one country with a problem with this issue. Research published in January from UK medical journal The Lancet showed that among 17,000 samples taken from hospital patients in China who had infections, 1 percent may have been infected with bacteria resistant to colistin, an antibiotic used as a last resort. This may be the result of antibiotics overuse, making some infections untreatable. 

If nothing is done, so-called "super bug" infections could kill up to 10 million people a year by 2050, according to Britain's Review on Antimicrobial Resistance.

(With input from Xinhua)