Nations unite at the UN to combat antimicrobial resistance threat

At the recent United Nations General Assembly in New York, all countries approved a major new political declaration to radically scale up efforts to combat antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – a major threat to modern medicine.

AMR threatens to unwind a century of medical progress, and could return us to the pre-antibiotic era, where infections that are treatable today could become much harder to treat and grow potentially deadly tomorrow.

AMR is caused largely by the misuse and overuse of antimicrobial medicines – such as antibiotics – making microbes resistant to them, and diseases more dangerous and deadly.

It’s an issue with implications for health at large. Medical facilities are often where the most stubbornly treatment-resistant infections emerge and spread. AMR makes all manner of routine health procedures riskier; in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), approximately 11 percent of people who undergo surgery are infected in the process.

The burden of treatment-resistant infections falls heaviest on LMICs, where AMR is worsened by a lack of access to clean water, stretched health systems, limited budgets, poor access to diagnosis and appropriate treatment, and a lack of enforcement of legislation. Sepsis in newborns that spreads in hospitals is a particularly dramatic illustration of how tough the situation is in LMICs.

The crisis in equitable access to new and existing antimicrobial medicines is also felt most acutely in LMICs, where a lack of availability is a much bigger problem than misuse and overuse – the tools aren’t there in the first place. A lack of access to vaccines increases the risk of drug-resistant infections and a lack of access to diagnostics means it is harder to detect drug-resistant infections and prescribe the right treatments.

AMR also compounds challenges in some of the world’s most difficult circumstances. From Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine, AMR makes wartime injuries harder to treat. Even before the current conflict, AMR was found to be significantly increasing in Gaza, with a 300 percent rise in resistance to specific antibiotics in injured patients after the 2018-19 demonstrations.

The drug-resistant infections that start in conflict zones rarely stay within them, as people flee, medical evacuations are arranged, and soldiers are cared for alongside civilians in hospitals, leading AMR to spread. This is yet another reason why the best medicine is peace.

AMR is associated with more than a million deaths a year, with an escalating death toll projected over the coming decades.