Antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, is a rising global health concern – with doctors, scientists and public health experts sounding the alarm that some of the world’s most reliable antibiotics are becoming less effective against so-called “superbugs”.
AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses and parasites no longer respond to medicines, making people sicker and increasing the spread of infections, according to the World Health Organization (WHO
Antimicrobial resistance threatens a century of medical progress and could return us to the pre-antibiotic era, where infections that are treatable today could become a death sentence,” WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned this month.
AMR is thought to contribute to millions of deaths every year, and will cause increased suffering, particularly for low- and middle-income countries, the WHO said. The world needs new solutions, according to health experts
Dr Sylvia Omulo – a doctor of epidemiology, who holds a PhD in immunology and infectious diseases from the College of Veterinary Medicine at Washington State University – studies AMR. She works at their campus in
For almost 20 years, she has investigated the links between humans, animals and their shared environments, and the microbes that live inside all of them
But there’s a problem: In those studies, you’re only looking at the most sick patients. When [you] test patients in a hospital setting, and you find antibiotic-resistant bacteria, you assume it’s because it was acquired in hospital.
The population [of sick patients in hospital] becomes biased in the sense that they are just more likely to have an antibiotic-resistant bacterial strain than a population that has not used antibiotics [but that’s a correlation, not necessarily the cause]