Abstract
Antibiotic misuse, albeit with the best of intentions, is contributing to the global rise in antimicrobial resistance that, according to RAND Europe’s 2016 ‘Evaluation of the EC Action Plan against the Rising Threats from Antimicrobial Resistance’, causes 25,000 deaths in Europe every year, equating to €1.5 billion per annum in healthcare costs and loss in productivity. The global economic impact of growing antimicrobial resistance was estimated in a 2016 report by the World Bank, which indicated that drug-resistant infections could lead to a scale of economic chaos overshadowing that caused by the 2008 financial crisis, and wiping out 1.1% to 3.8% of annual global GDP by 2050, while adding potentially another $1 trillion to healthcare costs.
More recently, in early 2018, a first report released by the World Health Organization’s Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS), described high levels of resistance to a number of serious bacterial infections among the 22 high- and low-income countries participating in the initiative, which was established in 2015. The GLASS results found that resistance to penicillin ranged from 0% to 51% among the reporting countries. Additional data suggested that in some countries up to 65% of all cases of E. coli associated with urinary tract infections are resistant to ciprofloxacin, while in some geographies, up to 82% of patients with a suspected bloodstream infection exhibited resistance to some of the most commonly used antibiotics.
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