AMR Awareness Week (Day 7): how can we as individuals help reduce the risks to ourselves?
Well, welcome to the last day of WAAW week, taking note as before of a particular part of the official blurb, this time that “World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (WAAW) is intended to encourage best practices among the public”. In this final blog we anticipate the possibility that a nasty drug-resistant infectious bug does materialise some time in the future (as Sally Davies amongst many other have been warning) and address what we can do about this in terms of proactive preve
AMR Awareness Week (Day 6): MDR-TB, the existing anomolous AMR pandemic
The emergence and spread of multidrug-resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MDR-TB) represents one of the most daunting challenges to disease control worldwide let alone to controlling AMR. What is such a tragedy, therefore, is how much it has been demonstrably neglected in the last thirty years – and, as we have written many times before, we can’t help but wonder whether this is simply because TB is so clearly a disease of poverty, and poor people (and poorer coun
AMR Awareness Week (Day 5): the lack of new antibiotics, and the dubious role of Big Pharma
Once again, we begin by quoting a section of the official blurb for AMR Awareness Week: “World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (WAAW) is a global campaign that is celebrated annually to improve awareness and understanding of AMR and encourage best practices among … all who play a critical role in reducing the further emergence and spread of AMR.” And as we saw in yesterday’s blog, this critical role has to include the pharmaceutical industry. In particular this relates to the de
AMR Awareness Week (Day 4): "One Health Stakeholders’ Best Practices" – what's that all about?
The WHO state that World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (WAAW) is intended to encourage (amogst other things “best practices among … One Health stakeholders and policymakers, who all play a critical role in reducing the further emergence and spread of AMR.” In this blog, we will explore this term ‘One Health stakeholders’, examine who they are, how their practices might be improved, and the associated implications for our exposure to anti-microbial resistant pathogens if they d
AMR Awareness Week November 18-26 (Part 3): how can we as individuals help reduce the risks?
Amongst other things, the WHO proposes that “World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (WAAW) is intended to encourage “best practices among the public”, so with this in mind we’ll discuss what ‘best practice’ might mean, and also what we can do ourselves to support it. What follows isn’t exhaustive but we hope may be helpful (and we suspect that most of it will be quite familiar as well). Personal management of antibiotics Antibiotics are by far the most widely prescribed antimicro
World Antimicrobial Awareness Week November 18-26 (Day 2): the nature of the threat of AMR
So how big a problem is antimicrobial resistance? AMR is unquestionably a growing problem and indeed was endorsed as such by the WHO at the Sixty-Eighth World Health Assembly in May 2015. It's also no coincidence that the year before that, in 2014, the then UK prime minister David Cameron had commissioned a review regarding what he was being advised was a worrying global phenomenon. “If we fail to act,” he warned at the time, “we are looking at an almost unthinkable scenario
World Antimicrobial Awareness Week (WAAW) November 18-26 (Part 1)
Today is the first day of ‘World Antimicrobial Awareness Week’ and we will be publishing a series of blogs during the week, intending to appropriately promote better awareness by discussing what this week is all about (and it's a complex and multi-facetted issue that demands much better public understanding). We will at some point relate it to tuberculosis control (because that's what we're about), but also examine what can be done by politicians, global authorities, farmers,
