The silent pandemic of antibiotic resistance

When the World Health Organisation (WHO) launched last year’s World Antimicrobial Awareness Week, it expanded the campaign’s focus from antibiotics to all antimicrobials, including antiviral, antifungal and antiprotozoal drugs. The WHO said that framing the response to antibiotic resistance (ABR) within the broader antimicrobial resistance (AMR) agenda, including HIV and malaria, would “facilitate programmatic synergy and efficiency, and catalyse country-level action to combat drug-resistant infections”. But although there are many commonalities between ABR and AMR, there are also important differences that justify paying specific attention to antibiotics.

ABR has been a slow-growing pandemic, fueled in part by relatively weak political support for implementing national action plans that include the establishment of well-resourced surveillance systems. The resulting lack of context-specific data on the health and economic burden of resistance has created an obstacle to policy action.