Nations vow to reduce deaths from drug-resistant bacteria

At the meeting of world leaders in New York, they advocated a series of new goals and pledged to provide $100 million in funding to address the problem of drug-resistant bacteria, a global crisis affecting the poorest countries is all the more acute.

The issue was brought to the UN General Assembly for the first time since 2016 because the world's arsenal of effective medicines is rapidly running out.

Bacteria are constantly evolving and many have now developed resistance to existing drugs, while almost 40 years have passed since the last new class of antibiotics were introduced.

According to an analysis published in The lancet4.95 million deaths per year result from or are related to infections that are resistant to the antibiotics available to treat them – a phenomenon known as antimicrobial resistance. And there are major gaps in the development and access to new medicines.

The political declaration adopted by governments set a target of reducing the number of deaths due to antimicrobial resistance by 10 percent by 2030.

“This may sound modest, but it is a good start to establishing policy ambition,” said Jeremy Knox, head of infectious disease policy at the British health research foundation Wellcome.

The statement collectively calls on countries to provide $100 million in funding to boost progress, as well as ongoing national funding to help at least 60 percent of countries fund national action plans to address the problem by 2030.

This includes a commitment to establish an independent scientific panel to provide evidence on antimicrobial resistance, for example on climate change.

Low- and middle-income countries are disproportionately affected by drug-resistant infections, in part because they also have the highest prevalence of infectious diseases.

But “there isn't a single country in the world that doesn't have this problem,” says Ramanan Laxminarayan, director of the One Health Trust, a global health research organization based in the United States and India.

“It’s not like tuberculosis or diarrhea or anything like that. Every country has a problem,” said Laxminarayan, who was one of the lead authors of the Lancet series and helped negotiate the draft political declaration.

One problem is that the remaining few effective drugs are overused, giving bacteria more opportunities to develop resistance.

Laxminarayan, along with other global health experts, is calling for countries to also commit to reducing the inappropriate use of antibiotics in humans by 20 percent and the inappropriate use of antibiotics in animals by 30 percent by 2030.

Antibiotics “are essentially being sold like chocolate,” Sania Nishtar, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, said at a symposium on the issue in New York on Sunday (September 22).

Another part of the problem is the conditions that lead to infections, such as poor access to clean water and sanitation. According to the WHO, in 2022 at least 1.7 billion people used a drinking water source contaminated with feces.

One of the most effective ways to combat growing drug resistance, Nishtar says, is to vaccinate people against diseases before they get them.

“Slow-motion pandemic”

Mia Amor Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados and chair of the Global Leaders Group on Antimicrobial Resistance, hopes this will alert the world to the “silent, slow pandemic.”

“Too many people are already dying, but if this is to be the number one cause of death by 2050, then we have a moral obligation to start now,” she said at the symposium.

According to this, annual global funding for antibiotic research and development has increased by 25 percent to $1.68 billion since 2017 The lancet Series. However, many new antibiotics cannot be registered and are unaffordable for poorer countries.

Artificial intelligence

Trevor Mundel, president of global health at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, believes artificial intelligence could help remove barriers to developing new antibiotics.

“I'm really confident that in three to five years the drug development process will be completely transformed from what it is now,” he said at the symposium.

“It's going to change in terms of the time it takes to develop a drug, it's going to change in terms of the types of actors and parties, stakeholders that can actually participate.”

In the meantime, small pharmaceutical companies need help to keep going, says Laxminarayan. Eighty percent of new drug development takes place in small biotech companies, but these are “on the verge of bankruptcy,” he told SciDev.Net.

However, Laxminarayan is confident that the solutions are achievable.

“We have the money for prevention,” he said. “We have the money to improve access to treatment. We have the money to find ways to develop new antibiotics.”

“So I think these things need to get done now and we need to stop complaining about it being a difficult problem.”

Provided by SciDev.Net