“Global Burden of Disease Study to include antimicrobial resistance data”

“University of Washington and University of Oxford experts yesterday announced the inclusion of mortality and morbidity data related to drug-resistant infections into the annual Global Burden of Disease Study, part of a new antimicrobial resistance (AMR) project “to provide rigorous quantitative evidence of the burden of AMR, to increase awareness of AMR, to support better surveillance of AMR, and to foster the rational use of antimicrobials around the world,” according to a commentary in BMC Medicine.

“There are many challenges to estimating the burden of AMR,” the authors write. “Primarily, there is limited and unreliable current and historical information on the geographical distribution, prevalence, and incidence of AMR and its health burden, making the burden of AMR difficult to measure and limiting our ability to devise geographically explicit strategies for its control.”

The Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors (GBD) Study at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is the largest known repository of epidemiology data and can help researchers estimate the impact of a condition or health disparity like AMR on various populations. The GBD provides comparable estimates of mortality and disability resulting from 328 disease and injury causes and from 84 risk factors.

“Including AMR in the GBD will ensure that the resulting estimates comply with the rigorous, evidence-based framework that characterizes the GBD effort,” the authors conclude, adding that the effort will provide “essential health intelligence to guide interventions and policies, as well as a benchmark for measuring the impact of interventions on future burden.”