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TWN
Info Service on Health Issues (May15/10) Antibiotic
resistance: A global plan at last Tuesday 26 May 2015 (This was first published in The Star, a national Malaysian daily newspaper on 25 May 2015.) The World Health Assembly on 25 May adopted a global plan to address antibiotic resistance and other forms of antimicrobial resistance, which poses a major threat to human health and survival. Action may thus be coming at last to deal with one of the most important threats facing humanity – the fast-increasing resistance of bacteria to antibiotics and other medicines. For years and decades this problem has been growing, without serious efforts being taken across the world to stop it in its tracks. Patients are the ones that suffer the most. Old medicines no longer work against many diseases and newer and more potent medicines (often with stronger side effects) are also getting useless. Pathogens are getting increasingly resistant to drugs, affecting treatment for tuberculosis, malaria, influenza, HIV-AIDS, gonorrhoea, and common infections such as pneumonia and urinary tract infections. Patients going to hospitals are now increasingly acquiring infections unrelated to their original ailment, caused by highly resistant bacteria such as MRSA, which have caused thousands of deaths. Despite the publicity about resistance, there has been little action in most countries, until the problem has blown up to crisis proportions at national and global level. The World Health Organisation director-general Margaret Chan has called ours a post-antibiotic era – meaning that we are now living in a world where antibiotics may not work anymore. The consequences are horrifying to contemplate. In Thailand, antimicrobial resistance was found to kill 30,000 people a year and its economic impact amounted to 0.6% of the country’s GNP, according to the Thai Minister of Public Health, speaking at a panel discussion at the World Health Assembly last week. There is no time to lose for comprehensive action to be taken before the resistance crisis worsens. This is the background to the adoption of the global action plan on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) that was adopted on 25 May by the World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva (18 to 26 May). The plan has five objectives – to use medicines properly in human and animal health; reduce infection by sanitation, hygiene and infection prevention measures; strengthen surveillance and research; educate the public as well as doctors, veterinarians and farmers on proper use of antibiotics; and increase investment in developing new medicines, diagnostic tools and vaccines. The plan calls for actions by governments, the WHO Secretariat, international organisations, civil society groups and professional bodies. Most importantly, all governments are expected to have in place a national action plan on antimicrobial resistance within two years. These national plans are to be aligned with the global action plan and with international agencies’ standards and guidelines. The national actions should include:
In an earlier session of the WHA last week that discussed the global plan, some developing countries’ health officials highlighted the special needs of developing countries in implementing the global and national action plans. These include obtaining the necessary funding and technical equipment to implement a national action plan, as well as assurance that people in their countries will have access to the new medicines, vaccines and diagnostic tools that will be developed in future, and at affordable prices. It would be terrible if the present antibiotics don’t work anymore and when new ones are developed, the patients in developing countries cannot have access to these, because they are patented and thus have high prices. The global plan also calls on WHO to support countries to develop and implement their national plans, and to lead and coordinate support to countries to implement their investment needs and to publish progress reports. The adoption of the global action plan is a landmark and gives hope that international and national actions will now take off in a serious way to tackle antimicrobial resistance. Now that the plans are drawn up and approved, the difficult part has to be done: implementation. Our lives depend on it. To remind us of the seriousness of the problem, the WHO issued a Fact Sheet on antimicrobial resistance. Its key points include:
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