Weaker Germs, Stronger Cures

Context: ‘One Health’ is the optimum approach to counter the impact of antimicrobial resistance

Reasons for decreasing effectiveness of antibiotics

• Anti-Microbial Resistance (AMR): Most of the germs have acquired the capacity to resist the action of affordable antibiotics.
  • AMR is estimated to cause 10 million deaths annually by 2050, reduction in livestock production- by about 7.5 % and negative impact on Gross Domestic Product(GDP)-by 3.5%.
  • Irrational use of antibiotics in humans and animals has resulted in AMR.

Challenges in tackling AMR:

• Discovering new drugs is a costly and unpredictable process: discourages the pharmaceutical industry from investing in these initiatives.
  • No new class of antibiotics has been developed since 1984 and the estimated cost for developing a new antibiotic exceeds $1 billion.

The way to tackle AMR: The One Health Approach:

• Prudent use of available antibiotics in humans, animals, and agriculture with a set of multisectoral, multidisciplinary and multi-institutional actions.
  • India’s National Action Plan on AMR is an example of the One Health approach.
  • The World Health Organization Global Action Plan on AMR (2015) provides a road map for targeting One Health.
• Benefits of ‘One Health’ approach:
  • Efficient and cost-effective: It is an efficient and cost-effective response to AMR and several other challenges, including endemic zoonoses (diseases transmitted between animals and humans).
  • Provide a common platform:  provide a formal platform for experts to plan and work together towards shared objectives.
  • Multisectoral intervention: The approach supports focussed actions on the human­ animal­ environment interface for the prevention, detection and response to public health emergencies.
    • Nearly all the epidemics in the current millennium (SARS, MERS, bird flu and COVID­19) have originated from animals be­cause of unwanted excursion of hu­mans into animal domains.

Conclusion: One Health has been acknowledged as the optimum approach to counter the impact of AMR and future pandemics and must be adopted expeditiously.