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.