Oliver Schacht, CEO of precision medicine and genomics analysis company OpGen explores what we need to do to improve our fight against antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Though many in the United States are already putting the Covid-19 pandemic behind them, we are neither out of the woods nor are we doing everything we can to stop the next pandemic in its tracks. An increasingly growing concern, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), has been on the radar of the health community for years, though it has yet to spark widespread concern within the general public. And unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic, and particularly our response and treatment plans in its early stages, has only served to exacerbate the threat of AMR.
When examining the causes for AMR a few things immediately come to mind. The first is antibiotic overuse, with global consumption up 39% from 2000-2015 and noted over-prescription of antibiotics in Covid-19 patients. On a more macro level, the lack of education on infection control practices is also detrimental to the AMR cause. And more practically, inadequate access to rapid testing and outbreak monitoring technologies, insufficient data sharing policies and a lacking emphasis on global collaboration all contribute to the threat of AMR. In order to take this threat seriously, the healthcare community needs to prioritise a global, unified approach. But in the meantime, here are some steps to minimise the effects of AMR before it spirals out of control.