Report publication According to the United Nations today, we have ignored a major component of the superbug problem: the environment. We receive pharmaceutical waste liquid.
“The drivers of environmental degradation are exacerbating the problem of antimicrobial resistance,” said Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), in a statement. “The impact of antimicrobial resistance can disrupt our health and food systems.”
The 120-page policy document “Bracing for Superbugs” identifies the environment as a place where antibiotic resistance emerges, wreaking havoc and causing as many as 1.27 million deaths annually. It’s a problem public health planners are already aware of for centers, livestock, fish and crop producing farms. This report provides an understanding of pathogens beyond these economic sectors, such as resistant bacteria emerging downstream of hospital sewage treatment plants and agricultural fungicides that turn common hospital infections into untreatable infections. provide researchers with a framework for Governments should create regulations to curb antibiotic contamination, rely on food producers to reduce antibiotic use, improve sanitation systems to remove resistant bacteria from sewage, and ensure environmental protection is working. It says that we need to create a monitoring program to verify whether.
Practically speaking, it has elevated UNEP as a leader in the global struggle to control drug-resistant bacteria, linking it with other UN agencies (World Health Organization, World Animal Health Organization, Food and Agriculture Organization) in a ‘one health’ approach. increase. Concern for humans, animals and the environment. This is important because countries are already developing plans to control antibiotic resistance through the United Nations process launched in 2016. Countries are now being asked to consider environmental protection to reduce resistant infections in their populations.
This is a long-awaited move to reframe the superbug problem and transform it from one caused by inappropriate user behavior to shared responsibility for the compromised planetary microbiome. .
Claas Kirchhelle, historian of science and medicine and assistant professor at University College Dublin, said: “And in the long term, this is where antimicrobial stewardship should be headed, not just over the next two to three years, but over the next 20 to 30 years.”
Given that the first antibiotics were purified from the products of naturally occurring organisms, it seems remarkable that the role of the environment has been ignored so far. But two years ago, he found that Kirchhelle and his colleagues in six countries examined his 75-year international policy statement on drug resistance, and found that of 248, the environment was of continuing concern. He found only two worthy ones. “It was justifiable to think of this only from a human health perspective. After all, millions of people die from his AMR,” he said, referring to antimicrobial resistance. increase. “But we’ve been talking about ways to regulate AMR for half a century, and yet antimicrobial use and antimicrobial resistance continue to rise. So it’s time to think more broadly. “
