This comment concludes: 'Spending needs to be directed to preventing infections in the first place, making sure existing antibiotics are used appropriately and judiciously, and to bringing new antibiotics to market. Health and political leaders at local, national, and international levels need to take seriously the importance of addressing AMR and the challenge of poor access to affordable, effective antibiotics.'
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(22)00087-3/fulltext?dgcid=raven_jbs_etoc_email#section-7c530872-6235-4433-899c-b3f276970189
CITATION: Comment| The Lancet, volume 399, issue 10325, p606-607, february 12, 2022
The overlooked pandemic of antimicrobial resistance
Ramanan Laxminarayan
Published:January 19, 2022 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00087-3
It refers to a linked paper from the Global Burden of Disease which estimates there were 5 million deaths associated with bacterial AMR globally in 2019.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02724-0/fulltext
COMMENT (Neil PW): Underlying the 'overlooked pandemic of antimicrobial resistance' is an overlooked, fundamental cause: lack of access to relevant, reliable information to guide the use of antibiotics. HIFA has repeatedly stated that prescribers and users of medicines lack access to relevant, reliable information to guide the use of antibiotics (as with all medicines). WHO itself has stated ‘Globally, most prescribers receive most of their prescribing information from the pharmaceutical industry and in many countries this is the only information they receive.’ Such information is wholly inadequate to guide prescribing; moreover, marketing information from pharma companies is designed primarily to sell and thereby contributes to irrational prescribing. The HIFA Project on Prescribers and Users of Medicines recently conducted a systematic review with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and University of Nagasaki, on how primary healthcare workers obtain health information during consultations to support decision-making for prescribing https://gh.bmj.com/content/5/4/e002094 The findings confirmed 'a lack of up-to-date and relevant medicine information in low and lower middle-income settings'. The project working group stands ready to build on this work, subject to funding (£10k per year). If you would like to contribute to this effort, please contact me: neil@hifa.org
Best wishes, Neil
Joint Coordinator HIFA Project on Information for Prescribers and Users of Medicines http://www.hifa.org/projects/prescribers-and-users-medicines
"Let's build a future where every prescriber and user worldwide will have access to independent, reliable, understandable information on the full range of commonly prescribed medicines - and will know where to find it."
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of the HIFA global health movement (Healthcare Information For All - www.hifa.org ), a global community with more than 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting on six global forums in four languages in collaboration with WHO. HIFA brings stakeholders together to accelerate progress towards universal access to reliable healthcare information.
Twitter: @hifa_org neil@hifa.org
