Long blog - Antimicrobial Resistance: spoiling the party...
with physics and material science
Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) is a macro threat to the sustainability of the human race and other species. It is of a similar level to that of the worst impacts of climate change or biodiversity loss and is inextricably linked. Bringing together biological, behavioural, and physical solutions with appropriately incentivising funding we should be able to continue to enjoy the benefits of our microbe partners whilst avoiding their darker side. This is potentially a massive, if complex, theme for those who care about sustainability; the potential goes well beyond the pharmaceutical industry.
This blog is a summary of a much longer version that we recently published on our new blog platform The Sustainable Investor. You can read the long blog here, its free, you just need to register.
As we flagged earlier, we have set up this new platform as it gives a much better service to you, our valued readers. You can sort the blogs by topic, search, and the blog layout better suited to our longer format. We will keep publishing here for the foreseeable future, but we encourage you to have a look - we think you will like it.
Antibiotics and other antisepsis measures revolutionised surgery and healthcare. Highly invasive operations, such as gut surgery and joint replacements all depend on antibiotics to prevent infection and be successful. Certain treatments which render the immune system less effective, such as chemotherapy, are made viable by the support provided by antibiotics. Where previously catching certain infections was pretty much a death sentence, antibiotics and other antimicrobials provided hope.
However, some microbes have adapted, either over the long term through genetic mutation or using existing defence mechanisms, and are now able to resist attempts to stop them being infectious and causing disease. That adaptation is helped when antimicrobials, especially antibiotics, are over- or inappropriately used. Not only does that mean antimicrobials could become less effective at treating/preventing infections, but they may also stop working altogether.
Antimicrobial resistance poses a catastrophic threat. If we don’t act now, any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that can’t be treated by antibiotics."
Professor Dame Sally Davies, UK Special Envoy on AMR
I have been covering AMR for a few years now and it is encouraging to see the recent acceleration in interest and awareness with more and more events and reports being published.
If the area of AMR is new to you and you want to get up to speed have a look at the primer I produced. In it I give an overview of microbes and in particular bacteria before going on to describe how resistance occurs and is propagated, before finally introducing some possible solutions to help combat AMR.
In the primer I highlight that whilst a natural focus for efforts would be to “find more antibiotics” if at the high level we are “running out of antibiotics that work” it is only one avenue: biological or pharmacological.
In a long blog, which you can read here, I dig down into the different approaches to help resolve the AMR challenge, and no, they are not all from the Pharma industry.
Happy reading.