The World Health Organization Global Action Plan for antimicrobial resistance

If our overuse and misuse of antibiotics is not halted now, about 10 million people will die annually from drug-resistant bacterial infections within 35 years. The hammer blow will fall hardest on Africa and Asia, accounting for 4.1 and 4.7 million deaths, respectively, and the world’s economy will lose more than 7% of its gross domestic product (USD210 trillion) by 2050. These numbers should make people sit up, listen and change behaviour.

A global call for action to combat antimicrobial resistance: Can we get it right this time?

World Health Organization resolution WHA67.25 ‘Combating antimicrobial resistance including antibiotic resistance’ urges member states ‘to develop or strengthen national plans, strategies and international collaboration for the containment of antimicrobial resistance’. Such calls have been heard before. What is different this time, how do we break the mould to ensure that significant international change occurs, and how is South Africa positioning itself to respond to the call? This editorial looks at ways to approach the problem

The Next WHO Director-General’s Highest Priority: a Global Treaty on the Human Right to Health

Amidst the many challenges facing the next WHO Director-General, the new WHO head should find WHO’s foremost priority in its most important constitutional pillar: the right to health. The centerpiece of this endeavor should be leadership on the Framework Convention on Global Health (FCGH), the proposed global treaty based in the right to health and aimed at national and global health equity. The treaty would reform global governance for health to enhance accountability, transparency, and civil society participation and protect the right to health in trade, investment, climate change, and other international regimes, while catalyzing governments to institutionalize the right to health at community through to national levels. It would usher in a new era of global health with justice – vast improvements in health outcomes, equitably distributed. With the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control having served as a proof of concept, the FCGH would be an innovative treaty finding solutions to overcome global health failings in accountability, equality, financing, and inter-sectoral coherence. It would include a global health accountability framework, encompassing, civil society engagement, independent monitoring, and plans for redress, while catalyzing national health accountability strategies, accountability mechanisms, disaggregated data, and community participation. National health equity strategies, pro-poor pathways to universal health coverage, and robust non-discrimination provisions could elevate the voices, priorities, and ultimately power of marginalized populations. The FCGH would include a national and global health financing framework, while reaching beyond the health sector with right to health assessments, public health participation in developing international agreements, and responsibility for all sectors for improving health outcomes. The FCGH would reinvigorate WHO’s global health leadership, breathing new life into its founding principles. It could become the platform for reforming WHO as a rights-based 21st century institution, with badly-needed reforms, such as community participation, new priorities favouring social determinants of health, and a culture of transparency and accountability. The next Director-General should launch a historic effort to align national and global governance for with human rights through the FCGH, bringing the world closer to global health with justice

A call for citizen science in pandemic preparedness and response : beyond data collection

The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need to partner with the community in pandemic preparedness and response in order to enable trust-building among stakeholders, which is key in pandemic management. Citizen science, defined here as a practice of public participation and collaboration in all aspects of scientific research to increase knowledge and build trust with governments and researchers, is a crucial approach to promoting community engagement. By harnessing the potential of digitally enabled citizen science, one could translate data into accessible, comprehensible and actionable outputs at the population level. The application of citizen science in health has grown over the years, but most of these approaches remain at the level of participatory data collection. This narrative review examines citizen science approaches in participatory data generation, modelling and visualisation, and calls for truly participatory and co-creation approaches across all domains of pandemic preparedness and response. Further research is needed to identify approaches that optimally generate short-term and long-term value for communities participating in population health. Feasible, sustainable and contextualised citizen science approaches that meaningfully engage affected communities for the long-term will need to be inclusive of all populations and their cultures, comprehensive of all domains, digitally enabled and viewed as a key component to allow trust-building among the stakeholders. The impact of COVID-19 on people’s lives has created an opportune time to advance people’s agency in science, particularly in pandemic preparedness and response

GUEST EDITORIAL: The World Health Organization Global Action Plan for antimicrobial resistance

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A global biomedical r&d fund and mechanism for innovations of public health importance

Bernard Pécoul and colleagues call for the establishment of a global biomedical R&D fund as a key priority of the G7 summit in June 2015

Strategies for achieving global collective action on antimicrobial resistance

Antimicrobial medicines now save millions of lives each year and many infectious diseases are far less deadly because of them.1 However, bacteria, viruses, parasites and fungi develop resistance to existing medicines and few novel antimicrobial products are being produced. Antimicrobial resistance – i.e. resistance of microorganisms to an antimicrobial drug that was originally effective for treating the infection it causes – is both natural and inevitable. However, inappropriate antimicrobial use, falsified or substandard drugs and poor infection control accelerate the pace of evolutionary processes