Targeting Drug Resistance – Achievable Goals to Keep Antibiotics Working

The problem of antimicrobial resistance – AMR for short – is clear. More and more of these germs resistant to existing treatments are emerging everywhere, and there’s little disagreement that governments, nonprofits, doctors, patients, and politicians all need to help tackle the problem.

But people need to agree on what to do, and they need to agree on how to measure progress.

That’s where targets come in.

Aislinn Cook, a senior research fellow in infectious disease epidemiology on the antimicrobial resistance team in the Centre for Neonatal and Pediatric Infection of St. George’s University in London, is helping set some of those targets. Cook, who’s also affiliated with the Health Economics Research Centre at the University of Oxford, has helped write a series of papers in the Lancet medical journal bringing attention to the problem of antimicrobial resistance. AMR is a big topic of international discussion in 2024, due in part to it being one of the topics of the United Nations High-Level Meeting, and the Lancet series was put together to help focus that discussion.

Cook’s paper proposes some clear targets to reach by 2030: a 10 percent reduction in mortality from drug-resistant infections; a 20 percent reduction in inappropriate human antibiotic use; and a 30 percent reduction in inappropriate animal antibiotic use.

These goals should be achievable, Cook says. Listen as she tells One World, One Health about some concrete ways the world can work together to control the spread of drug-resistant germs.

Learn more about the struggle to control drug-resistant bacteria, viruses, and fungi in some of our other episodes. We’ve spoken with experts about how vaccines can help prevent the spread of drug-resistant germs, about tracking superbugs in sewage, and the surprising rise of drug-resistant fungi. Experts in drug design have talked to us about the search for new and better antibiotics and how these little organisms are winning an arms race against us. Filmmakers have told us about how storytelling can help people understand the threat while global health specialists explained that good stewardship can keep the antibiotics we have working as they should. We’ve even investigated superbug mysteries, like the case of the killer eyedrops.