Harnessing COVID-19 to safeguard future health: invest in WASH and infection prevention and control to beat antimicrobial resistance

Antimicrobial resistance: a slow-moving pandemic
One crisis that has been at the forefront of WaterAid, WHO’s and UNICEF’s minds is antimicrobial resistance (AMR). AMR has been labelled a slow-moving pandemic – one we have known about for quite some time, and one, now more than ever, that needs to be tackled as we think about building back better from COVID-19.

Long before COVID-19, we knew the AMR crisis was looming. We have also known what can be done to curb or even halt this slow-building pandemic. But we have not succeeded in putting these measures in place at the speed and the scale we need to. If we don’t want health crises like we have experienced in 2020 to become the new norm, we need to tackle AMR – immediately.