New ReAct Brief: Antibiotic resistance is one of the greatest & most urgent cross-border health crises of our time – but still not addressed as such!

2023-12-20

New ReAct briefing note out ahead of the UN General Assembly High-Level meeting on AMR in September, 2024.

As governments are now starting preparations towards the second ever UN High-level meeting on AMR which will take place in New York next year, ReAct now launches its briefing and puts forwards its recommendations for global collective action to address antibiotic resistance.

Sets a positive vision on access to effective antibiotics

The briefing highlight the urgency of addressing antibiotic resistance, and makes suggestion on how to reframe the issue and sets a positive vision for global action: ensuring sustainable access to effective antibiotic treatment for all.

Global action in resource scare settings needed

The briefing comes as a result of an extensive process this last year with numerous discussions of  the way forward for the global response at all levels. This included a number of workshops, discussions and big international meetings organized by ReAct’s network with broad participation across countries, sectors, professions as well as from different actors. As always, these discussions took particular interest in discussing how global action can be more effective in addressing antibiotic resistance in the resource scarce settings which carries the highest mortality burden from resistant infections.

ReAct Africa Director Mirfin Mpundu says:

“Addressing antibiotic resistance effectively will require big changes – to governance, financing, systems transformation and the change of behaviors and practices. But at the end of the day the end goal must be to ensure that everyone who has a resistant infection, or requires surgery, or needs cancer treatment, or is born premature can in fact access effective antibiotics in the future – this is the expectation that we should all voice to governments from now to September next year.”

Note includes technical recommendations

Aside from more overarching calls for urgency of action and reframing of how antibiotic resistance (and AMR more broadly) is conceived, the new briefing note makes a number of more technical recommendations across core areas such as financing, infection prevention, sustainable access to effective antibiotics, governance, civil society and community engagement and One Health.

ReAct Europe Director Anna Sjöblom concludes:

“The UNGA High-level meeting must be a turning point in the global response to AMR – and more specifically to antibiotic resistance. Enough with the talk of ‘a silent pandemic’ –  antibiotic resistance is here now and is a global leading cause of suffering and unnecessary loss of lives across the world. The global response must finally start to reflect this fact.”