DGUtley
02-17-2021, 08:17 AM
The next pandemic? It may already be upon us - Antimicrobial resistance won’t race across the world like Covid-19, but its effects will be devastating. (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/15/creating-conditions-next-pandemic-antibiotics).
(What is antimicrobial resistance? Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites change over time and no longer respond to medicines making infections harder to treat and increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness and death)
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were a silver lining to this pandemic? If history is anything to go by there may actually turn out to be a number of them, though we can’t quite see them yet, but here’s one that is just beginning to gleam. In the words of Prof Kevin Outterson: “Today, people understand the social disruption from an untreatable infection.”
Outterson teaches health law at Boston University, but you could also think of him as an activist on the cause of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the rising tide of microbial evolution that threatens to sweep away a central pillar of modern medicine – antibiotics, or more generally, anti-infectives. This tide has been rising for decades, though for a long time only medics and those who directly experienced the horrifying consequences of AMR realised what a threat it posed (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/10/superbugs-a-far-greater-risk-than-covid-in-pacific-scientist-warns). Covid-19 could change that.
In fact AMR could, potentially, cause the next pandemic. Sally Davies, the UK’s special envoy on AMR, captures the difference between that hypothetical pandemic, and the one that’s buffeting us now, in a vivid metaphor: “Covid’s a lobster dropped into boiling water, making a lot of noise as it expires, whereas AMR is a lobster put into cold water, heating up slowly, not making any noise.” Those who study AMR warn the water is pretty hot.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/15/creating-conditions-next-pandemic-antibiotics
34951
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/antimicrobial-resistance
(What is antimicrobial resistance? Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites change over time and no longer respond to medicines making infections harder to treat and increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness and death)
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were a silver lining to this pandemic? If history is anything to go by there may actually turn out to be a number of them, though we can’t quite see them yet, but here’s one that is just beginning to gleam. In the words of Prof Kevin Outterson: “Today, people understand the social disruption from an untreatable infection.”
Outterson teaches health law at Boston University, but you could also think of him as an activist on the cause of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the rising tide of microbial evolution that threatens to sweep away a central pillar of modern medicine – antibiotics, or more generally, anti-infectives. This tide has been rising for decades, though for a long time only medics and those who directly experienced the horrifying consequences of AMR realised what a threat it posed (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/10/superbugs-a-far-greater-risk-than-covid-in-pacific-scientist-warns). Covid-19 could change that.
In fact AMR could, potentially, cause the next pandemic. Sally Davies, the UK’s special envoy on AMR, captures the difference between that hypothetical pandemic, and the one that’s buffeting us now, in a vivid metaphor: “Covid’s a lobster dropped into boiling water, making a lot of noise as it expires, whereas AMR is a lobster put into cold water, heating up slowly, not making any noise.” Those who study AMR warn the water is pretty hot.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/15/creating-conditions-next-pandemic-antibiotics
34951
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/antimicrobial-resistance