Today is World Health Day, an event held on the 7th April every year since 1950 to mark the founding of the World Health Organisation and an opportunity to draw worldwide attention to a subject of major importance to global health.
Antimicrobial resistance: no action today no cure tomorrow
This year the World Health Organisation has devoted World Health Day toantimicrobial resistance. This is a problem that is becoming more widespread as bacteria, viruses and parasites develop resistance to antibiotic. Antibiotics and antimicrobial drugsa have changed human history since their introduction in the 1940s, reducing the burden of major diseases such as syphilis, tuberculosis (TB), and leprosy. But in a statement on the WHO website Margaret Chan raises the prospect of a “post-antibiotic era, in which many common infections will no longer have a cure and will, once again, kill unabated.” This statement underlines the urgency of the issue in malaria and TB in particular – resistance to the latest generation of malaria drugs has been detected and although worldwide deaths from TB are declining, the WHO reports that nearly half a million people last year developed multidrug resistant TB. (This videohighlights the effect of drug-resistant TB in Kazakstan, Lesotho and the Philippines).
A major factor contributing to the growth of antimicrobial resistance is the inappropriate use of medicines and this features in the six point policy package that the WHO proposes to encourage governments to take the right measures to tackle the problem. The package emphasizes the need to regulate medicine use and ensure that patients gain uninterrupted access to essential medicines, to enhance infection prevention and control, as well as developing comprehensive national financial plans, strengthening laboratory and surveillance capacity, and help foster innovation and research into new tools to deal with the problems.
