COVID-19 related antimicrobial resistance challenges and opportunities

Challenges

  • •Resources directed away from AMR surveillance
  • •Increase in pre-emptive antibiotic prescribing to prevent secondary bacterial infections
  • •Antibiotic overuse in agribusiness
  • •Delays in AMR legislation
  • •Antimicrobial drug shortages
  • •Empty pharmaceutical pipeline
  • •USA withdrawal of support for WHO
  • •Low public awareness of AMR
  • •Crisis fatigue

Opportunities

  • •Subsidise hospital AMR surveillance
  • •Integrate AMR risk into investment practices
  • •Prioritise antimicrobial stewardship programmes
  • •Develop rapid diagnostics
  • •Embrace One Health approach
  • •Ban medically important antibiotics in agribusiness
  • •Promote consumer and supplier/private sector awareness and action on food choices
  • •Pass legislation (eg, DISARM and PASTEUR Acts)
  • •Incentivise new antibiotics and other promising anti-infectives
  • •Strengthen global collaboration and governance architecture
  • •Enact PACCARB and UN IACG recommendations
  • •Develop collaborative public information campaigns
  • •Leverage infection control principles from COVID-19 experience

Source: Confronting antimicrobial resistance beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 US election, The Lancet publication