Historic U.N meeting urges action against antimicrobial resistance

World leaders for the United Nations met this week to discuss the threat of antimicrobial resistance, historically marking it as the fourth time the general assembly has met to discuss a major world health issue.

All 193 U.N member states signed a declaration which insisted upon tackling the spread of infections that are resistant to antimicrobial medicines.

The agreement takes a broad and coordinated approach to antimicrobial resistance, challenging the root causes in areas such as human health, animal health and agriculture.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), antimicrobial resistance occurs when bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi develop resistance against medicines that were previously able to cure them.

Antimicrobial or antibiotic resistance is not a recent development. In Alexander Flemming’s 1945 Nobel Prize Lecture he warned of the danger of making microbes resistant to drugs stating:  

“It is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body”

Drug-resistance infections are estimated to kill 700,000 people each year and by 2050 the estimated annual death-till will be 10 million, according to a report. The report goes on to say that because of the high usage of antimicrobials, microbes are more likely to develop a resistance. This problem is highlighted by the limited number of new antimicrobials and antibiotics emerging to replace the previous ineffective ones.

U.N secretary-general Ban-Ki Moon said: “It is not that it may happen in the future. It is a very present reality – in all parts of the world, in developing and developed countries; in rural and urban areas; in hospitals; on farms and in communities. If we fail to address this problem quickly and comprehensively, antimicrobial resistance will make providing high quality universal health coverage more difficult, if not impossible.’

The European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (ESCMID) sent an open-letter to UN president, H.E Mr Mogens Lykketoft ahead of the meeting to welcome the decision by the secretary general to act on the problem.

The society urged the secretary general to work towards setting binding targets and taking concrete action to effectively fight AMR. Measures should include improving surveillance of resistance, regulation of the appropriate use of antimicrobial drugs in human medicine and animal farming, education and public campaigns on overuse as well as incentives and funding systems to promote the development of new medicines, new diagnostics and innovative interventions to improve antibiotic use and infection control.