Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest and most urgent cross-border challenges of our time, and it is rapidly threatening to reverse century-long progress in global public health and modern medicine. When governments convene again at a high-level meeting on antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, during the U.N. General Assembly in September to take stock of the problem and make new commitments, it should be an urgent priority to bring the global AMR governance system together in a way that can address the insufficient attention it is getting.
More lives are today lost from antibiotic resistance than from both HIV and malaria combined. Infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria claimed 1.27 million lives in 2019. One-fifth of these deaths were children under the age of 5. At the same time, millions of people die every year from preventable common bacterial infections due to the lack of access to antibiotics.
Yet the world’s response to antibiotic resistance remains vastly insufficient to mitigate the consequences of this crisis for people, animals, the global economy, and for global development. Antibiotic resistance jeopardizes the achievement of several Sustainable Development Goals such as SDG 3 on good health and well-being, SDG 2 on zero hunger, and SDG 6 on clean water and sanitation.
About the authors
Otto Cars
Dr. Otto Cars is a specialist in infectious diseases and a professor emeritus at Uppsala University, Sweden. He led the Swedish programme against antimicrobial resistance between 1995-2010 and has served as an expert to the World Health Organization and several European agencies. He was the founder in 2005 of the international network ReAct.
Martha Gyansa-Lutterodt
Martha Gyansa-Lutterodt is a pharmacist with over 38 years of experience in national and global health. Gyansa-Lutterodt is the chairman of the Ghana Chapter of West Africa Post Graduate College of Pharmacists. She chairs the AU-NEPAD Africa Medicines Harmonisation Committee for Policy and Legal Reforms.
Dr. Stefan Swartling Peterson
Stefan Swartling Peterson is a public health physician and professor of global transformation for health at Karolinska Institutet, Sweden. A former global chief of health at UNICEF, he is now a visiting professor at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.
