Professor Dame Sally Davies, Emiliano Rial Verde
This report focuses on how bacterial bodies become resistant to the agents meant to kill them and how this poses an emergent threat across species and national borders.
Antimicrobial resistance is the ability of infectious organisms, including bacteria, to survive the agents designed to kill them and save patients from infection. Resistance can spread quickly across different bacterial species, from bacteria in animals to those in humans, and across national borders.
As a result, many types of bacteria causing human illnesses have become resistant to multiple antibiotics, leaving healthcare professionals in all countries with few treatment options. In fact, using a conservative estimate, more than half a million people die of resistant infections around the world every year, making antimicrobial resistance a threat that public health officials, politicians, healthcare professionals, and the public can no longer ignore.