Dear All (prepare for something that is delightfully different and marvelously wonkish AND with thanks to Lance Price for co-authoring this newsletter), Continuing with the theme in the 15 Aug 2025 newsletter (“Global livestock resistome: Antibiotic resistance is widespread!”) of ways to use sequencing of samples from the environment, we have today an amazing paper in
Dear All (and with thanks to Kevin Outterson for co-authoring this newsletter), In the wake of the Sep 2024 UNGA HLM on AMR (UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on AMR), it has been encouraging to see the continued discussion around Push and Pull incentives for antibacterial innovation and access (see the AMR.Solutions post-UNGA webpage for
Dear All (wonkish but stick with it … I’m going to try very hard to de-wonk it; addendum: see also the follow-up newsletter mentioned below), In an absolutely terrifying paper and technical report in today’s issue of Science, we are introduced in detail to the concept of “mirror” bacteria in which all chiral elements of
Dear All, As a follow-on to the global commitments made during the 2024 UN General Assembly High-Level Meeting on AMR (UNGA 2024 HLM AMR), the Global Future Council on AMR of the World Economic Forum (WEF) authored the 2025 Davos Compact on AMR with review by the Quadripartite Joint Secretariate on AMR as a way for organizations to
Dear All: Two things today. Unrelated, but both relevant! WHO’s GLASS: WHO’s Global Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance System (GLASS) was created during October 2015 and seeks to obtain coordinated and consistent global estimates on resistance rates. In a major report released on 29 Jan 2018, GLASS now provides provides official national AMR data for the period 2016-17 from 40 countries
Dear All, With thanks to alert reader Liam Sharkey, a post-doc in Melbourne, for the heads-up on this topic, I am very pleased to see the 17 June 2025 report from Australia entitled “Fighting Superbugs: A Subscription-Style Reimbursement Mechanism to Boost Australia’s Arsenal of Antimicrobial Medicines.” This paper is the output from a Nov 2024 roundtable in Canberra
Dear All, Novel antibacterial agents, vaccines, and diagnostics will do little if they are not widely available and used responsibly. CDDEP’s recent report entitled “The State of the World’s Antibiotics in 2021” makes this very clear: “… more people in LMICs (low-middle-income countries) die from lack of access to antimicrobials than from resistant infection.” Hence, CARB-X has
Dear All (and with thanks to Lance Price for co-authoring this deeply wonkish newsletter), Today we turn to the idea of examining livestock manure for the presence of antibiotic resistance genes. You can easily see how this idea plays into the question of how to track and control AMR. Before we dive into the paper, however,
Dear All, The 27 Sep 2024 newsletter (“Without action, AMR costs go from $66b to $159b/yr by 2050”) reviewed a report by Anthony McDonnell and a team led by the Center for Global Development in which they created economic estimates of the costs/values of action (and inaction) through 2050, based on 5 possible action/ inaction scenarios.
Dear All, Back in 2019-2020, WHO developed a set of TPPs (TPP = Target Product Profile = A description of the desired attributes of a drug) for products for enteric fever, gonorrhea, neonatal sepsis, and urinary tract infections as guides for developers (see the 1 Sep 2019 newsletter for the original call for input and the link