Tag Archives: antimicrobial resistance

We are underestimating the threat of antimicrobial resistance; where is the “Clean New Deal”?

By Harry Mayall | Fri 13th March 2020 - 5:59 pm

It can be very soundly argued that if someone was to objectively look at the biggest issues facing humanity today then antimicrobial resistance (AMR) would be easily considered one of the greatest.

According to the World Bank, AMR is likely to cause a 1.1-3.8% fall in Global GDP by 2050, with the damage to get continuously worse in the following years. For scale, this is an economic effect potentially larger than that of the 2008 financial crisis, and also larger than some estimates of the damage that global climate change would inflict over the same time period. Let us not understate the human costs as well: the WHO estimates the death count of AMR pathogens is already 700,000 annually and will rise to 10 million by 2050 unless urgent action is taken.

These statistics are very scary and should be enough to convince anyone of the severity of the threat, which in both economic and human consequences is expected to rival climate change. Despite this, there is very little political attention given to AMR.

In the 20,000 words that make up the 2019 Liberal Democrat manifesto, there is only one mention of antimicrobial resistance, which is simply mentioned in passing as part of a policy on improving hygiene in livestock. The 2019 Conservative manifesto and the 2019 Labour manifesto both do even worse, not mentioning antimicrobial resistance a single time; they only mention offhandedly that they will spend more money to counter the threat of numerous things, including antibiotic resistance (which unlike AMR doesn’t include resistance to non-antibiotic drugs such as medications used to counter pathogens such as Malaria and Tuberculosis).