A Call to Antimicrobial Arms

Feb 9, 2015 Jim O'Neill

The world urgently needs new drugs to replace the antimicrobial drugs that are losing effectiveness, but the incentives to invest in research are missing. A solution need not be expensive, especially when compared to the alternative: $100 trillion in lost output by 2050 and ten million deaths every year.

JAKARTA – In December, I reported the first findings of the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, which I chair. The news wasn’t good: Resistant infections already claim more than 700,000 lives a year. Unless action is taken, antimicrobial resistance will kill ten million people a year by 2050 – more than the number of people who currently die from cancer. It will also have a cumulative cost of at least $100 trillion, more than 1.5 times today’s annual global GDP.

We are not doing nearly enough to combat this danger. The world urgently needs new drugs to replace the antibiotics, anti-malarial regimes, anti-retroviral AIDS and HIV medications, and tuberculosis treatments that are losing effectiveness. But we do not invest enough in research and development. It is critical that we find new sources of funding to support the academic researchers and small companies whose discoveries are laying the foundations for tomorrow’s medicines.

That is why I am calling on international donors – philanthropic and governmental alike – to work with the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance to create a new fund to support R&D in this important area. The fund will provide grants for blue-sky science and act as a non-profit incubator for promising discoveries. Over the coming months, the Review will be working out the details of how such a fund could operate effectively.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 7 Comments on this article

Arjan van Houwelingen May 15, 2015

While there is indeed a need to find new antibiotics there is equally a need to be more responsible in the usage of the antibiotics that we have. This is especially true with regard to the use of antibiotics in the livestock industry.

A recent study (30 January 2015) by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) concluded that the number of milligrams of antibiotics administered per kilo of biomass was higher in animals than humans - http://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/4006.htm

As there is no guarantee that increased investment will lead to the discovery of new antibiotics, action now on more responsible use should really be self evident. We must ask ourselves the question whether cheap meat and milk today is really worth the risk of dying from the common cold in the future?
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kiers sohn Mar 15, 2015

Former BRICS honcho of Goldman is interested in antimicrobial resistance, and chairs a committee, demanding 0.1% of GLOBAL GDP......or else! Reminds me of the racial ostracization of MDM-1, when the US News Media openly announced that Brown People from certian Geographies were not to be touched with a ten foot pole nor allowed into or out of hospitals......i kid you not. Love you Goldman, Love you.
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kiers sohn Mar 15, 2015

Better usage of the English Language, Mr O'Neill of Goldman Sachs, would be to substiute "antimicrobial resistance" with "resistant microbes", don't you think?
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Victor Kamendrowsky Feb 19, 2015

We also need an ecological approach. The crowding resulting from habitat loss, factory farming, factory-like hospitals is a microbial breeding environment.
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Gary Ostrower Feb 15, 2015

Predictable that a Goldman Sachs guy would ignore the most important long-term solution: reduce the commercial use of antibiotics. If phara companies would leash in their promotion of these products (they spend more money promoting their products than on research); if doctors would stop prescribing antibiotics as if they were aspirin; if agribusiness would place public health above its own bottom line, we would have a fighting chance to combat drug-resistant disease.
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Marc Laventurier Feb 14, 2015

Speaking of 'arms', how about something like an antivenin for vampire squid bites?
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Nat Scientist Feb 12, 2015

From
http://www.microbeworld.org/what-is-a-microbe
"Microbes are in the air we breathe, the ground we walk on, the food we eat—they're even inside us!

We couldn't digest food without them—animals couldn't, either. Without microbes, plants couldn't grow, garbage wouldn't decay and there would be a lot less oxygen to breathe."

Sponsored-Science that thinks first of funding for grant approval will never criticize its fundamental assumptions. In this time-shifted (start your history at the point in the curve desired to prove the conclusion as the wool of time is being pulled over hazy eyes) justification of enterprise, the result is a construction described by the known-in-advance, and well-subscribed-to. result.
Henry Hazlitt said all economics could be reduced to one sentence:
"The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups."
Science has no unintended consequences since discovered physical phenomena are agnostic of agenda or sponsorship
Experience leaves connections and traces of facts: that overuse of anti-biotics has evolutionary consequences that are not intended, and here are completely ignored by assertion of good medicine is delivering bad (anti-biotic) poison Such 'supporting your local sheriff' schemes doesn't make good law behind the badge.

Protecting biodiversity and maintaining beneficial bacteria doesn't need a war mentality, rather the opposite, understanding thoroughly and bio-dynamically criticizing simple facts found by anyone, for nothing, in the studied and relentless direct individual observation of nature, not narrative generals directing cash to their good-guy arms dealers.
For the purpose and beyond this tired effort, Henry Hazlitt was the only scientist the economics as social gaming business needs.
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