Building Capacity for Sustainable Antimicrobial Stewardship Across sub-Saharan Africa.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is understood as one of the most pressing global health challenges humanity faces. The ability of pathogens to withstand - and survive and thrive - pharmacotherapies, threatens the very foundation on which biomedicine is based. Although, antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) measures have improved the management of AMR, the emphasis of such protocols and practices to manage AMR have predominantly been the domain of the global North.
Understanding the truly global need to build capacity for knowledge and leadership of AMR and AMS, I assembled a multidisciplinary team of scientists from Leipzig University in Germany and seven sub-Saharan Africa research institutions (led by Makerere University in Uganda) to better understand the biomedical and sociocultural factors impacting AMR, and to thereby build the capacity for AMS across seven sub-Saharan African nations.
The resulting ‘African One Health Network for Disease Prevention’ (ADAPT) was funded for more than seven million Euros from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to redress these gaps in AMR understanding and AMS capacities over the next five years. The project and its rationale has been detailed in a recent Nature Medicine publication. Read the article at Nature.
Paul Kadetz, DPhil, MPH, MSN, Institute for Global Health and Development at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.
