Antimicrobial resistance: Experts warn of ‘growing threat’

“The world has an opportunity to respond with the energy and urgency that the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance requires,” the Global Leadership Group on Antimicrobial Resistance wrote in a report released Thursday. The document aims to stimulate leaders around the world to discuss this health risk on September 26 in New York.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)—antibiotics, antifungals, and antiparasitics—is already wreaking havoc and is a result of the massive use of these products in humans, animals, and food.

But the report also notes that there is converging evidence that “changes occurring in the environment due to the climate crisis are increasing the spread of infectious diseases, including potentially drug-resistant infections.”

Resistance

Microbes that are not completely killed by a given substance may then develop resistance to that product, gradually reducing, for example, the arsenal of drugs available to treat infections.

AMR is already one of the leading causes of death worldwide, directly responsible for 1.27 million deaths a year, including one in five among children under five, mainly in low- and middle-income countries, the report highlights . Once out of control, AMR is expected to reduce life expectancy by an average of 1.8 years by 2035 and lead to unprecedented health care costs and economic losses.

Over the course of a decade, AMR will cost the world $412 billion a year in additional health care costs and $443 billion a year in lost productivity, according to a study commissioned by the Global Leadership Group.

Effective responses to this scourge are expected to cost an average of $46 billion per year, but will generate up to $13 for every dollar spent by 2050, according to this impact study.

From local to global

“We have the tools to mitigate the AMR crisis, and these data point to a devastating future unless we take bolder action now,” said GLG Chair Mia Amor Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados. “Commitment to combating AMR must be personal, local, national and global,” she insists.

The working group makes proposals both for mobilizing funding – especially from international financial institutions – and for ways to overcome obstacles to the research and production of new effective medicines. The working group has set quantitative targets, which it believes are the only way to effectively mobilize the various parties.

Among these goals to be achieved by 2030: to reduce by 10% the number of deaths caused by bacterial AMRs worldwide, and to ensure that by 2030, 80% of human consumption of antibiotics is from the so-called ACCESS group.

According to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, this group includes antibiotics used for the first or second line treatment of common infections (such as ear infections) with a low risk of developing and spreading antimicrobial resistance.

Another goal is to reduce the amount of antimicrobials used in the global agri-food system by 30–50% compared to current levels.

More radically, the group proposes to eliminate the use of medically important antimicrobials in human and animal medicine for non-veterinary medical purposes or in crop and agri-food systems for non-phytosanitary purposes by 2030.