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The University of Southampton
Global Network for Anti-Microbial Resistance and Infection Prevention

NAMRIP features in 'Evidence to Policy' Blog

Published: 18 November 2016
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As part of Antibiotic Awareness Week, Professor Tim Leighton was invited to write a public policy blog for the University about the effects of antimicrobial resistance and how we're tackling this global challenge within NAMRIP.

Tim explains "Unless tackled, the rise of AntiMicrobial Resistance (AMR) will, by 2050, be killing more people than cancer, and current methods of food production will be untenable. However, action to prevent this needs to start now, and requires a strategy that extends beyond finding funds and using them through our existing funding models."

Within the blog, Tim asks global funders to consider two key policy recommendations which are: 

• to support groups that use the commonality of the problem they face (AMR) to bring together the multidisciplinary collaborations of the researchers who we expect to be leading AMR research in 10-20 years;

• to allow fundamental research, translation, and outreach to be seamlessly joined into programmes that span as many disciplines and Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) as AMR does. Public education in AMR must be a coordinated priority, not an addenda to a plethora of separate research projects. Projects that plan to conduct fundamental research with an industry who will then manufacture should not be out-of-bounds because funding agencies have remits to cover only a subset of the TRL spectrum: we need such projects, because AMR grows so quickly as to leave the traditional route of publishing research, and passively expecting others to discover that publication and make all the impact from it, too slow.

In conclusion Tim emphasizes that AMR is not just a healthcare issue but affects many areas of life. As an example of this, NAMRIP will co-host with the Food Standards Agency at the FSA headquarters in London, a meeting on the 25th November entitled ‘Food Retailers, Supply Chains and the Anti-microbial Resistance Challenge’.  It will explore how the retail sector affects the rise and spread of AMR, and how it must respond to minimize its contributions to this growing crisis. AMR will not be eliminated from the world, and the question is how we mitigate its affects, and invest to maximize those mitigations.

 

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