WHO: AMR among key health threats

The World Health Organization has published the ten threats to global health that merit special attention from WHO and health partners in 2019. Among them: drug-resistant pathogens.

The development of antibiotics, antivirals and antimalarials are some of modern medicine’s greatest successes. Now, time with these drugs is running out. According to the WHO, Antimicrobial resistance threatens to send us back to a time when we were unable to easily treat infections such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, gonorrhoea, and salmonellosis.

The inability to prevent infections could seriously compromise surgery and procedures such as chemotherapy. Resistance to tuberculosis drugs is a formidable obstacle to fighting a disease that causes around 10 million people to fall ill, and 1.6 million to die, every year. In 2017, around 600 000 cases of tuberculosis were resistant to rifampicin – the most effective first-line drug – and 82% of these people had multidrug-resistant tuberculosis.

Drug resistance is mostly driven by the overuse of antimicrobials in people, but also in animals, especially those used for food production, as well as in the environment. For this reason, WHO is working with these sectors to implement a global action plan to tackle antimicrobial resistance by increasing awareness and knowledge, reducing infection, and encouraging prudent use of antimicrobials.