When Superbugs Get Personal – From professional preoccupation to a family's nightmare

Dr. Nour Shamas knows about antimicrobial resistance. As a clinical pharmacist, she was trained in how to dispense drugs to treat infections, and her graduate studies in global health policy made her aware of the threat of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR. 

Antimicrobial resistance develops when bacteria, viruses, fungi, or parasites evolve the ability to shake off the effects of drugs developed to fight them. It’s one of the biggest threats to humanity – such a serious threat that the United Nations General Assembly is holding a meeting devoted to the subject. Shamas helps lead the Antimicrobial Stewardship Program at the Ministry of National Guard Health Affairs in Jeddah and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She knows about the need to preserve the drugs that still work against the many infections that threaten human life. 

But the issue of AMR got personal for her when her mother developed a urinary tract infection after surgery and a hospital stay. Shamas found herself working with her mother’s doctors, and battling to explain to her mother how she could have developed such an infection in the first place. She also found herself fighting to get the right treatment for her mother, who lives in Lebanon, a country struggling with economic challenges, conflict, and a fragile, underfunded, and overloaded healthcare system. 

Now, as a member of the World Health Organization’s AMR Survivors Task Force, she tells the story of how her mother still fights recurrent infections. Listen as she shares some of her story with One World, One Health.