Increasing alignment nationally with NAMRIP’s founding philosophy

The philosophy that NAMRIP was founded on, and championed, is gaining increasing ground and becoming more mainstream. Today’s ‘Today’ programme on Radio 4 carried an item on antimicrobial resistance and how we need to look further afield and develop novel approaches to combat anti-microbial resistance, not focus purely on developing new antibiotics. Scientists contributing to the programme commented that “the current crisis in antimicrobial resistance is a unique opportunity to stand back and think again” and “we need to learn to juggle with more than one antimicrobial ball”. Another commented that “while finding a new generation of antibiotics will feature, it does little to tackle the biological processes that drive us back to where we are today”. Researching alternatives “will help us break free from the evolutionary arms race we’re locked into with pathogenic bugs”.

The programme echoed NAMRIP’s widely-quoted statements in The Conversation article.

Professor Timothy Leighton, Chair of NAMRIP, said “I am very proud of the members of NAMRIP and am delighted to see the values and approaches we follow becoming mainstream. It is vital that we all understand that whilst support for new antimicrobial treatments is important, the need to use them represents a failure in infection prevention and vaccination. NAMRIP’s goal is to eliminate such failures. Coming so soon after the release of the seventh of a series of reports by Lord O’Neil national AMR Review, which also supports the kind of approach NAMRIP was founded on, hearing our feelings expressed so clearly can only help NAMRIP members keep going with the same gritty determination and inspiration that has produced so many breakthroughs by NAMRIP members.”