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"  ...  A ‘One Health’ Approach

In September 2023, a Council of Canadian Academies expert panel released a report that found 26% of Canada’s 1 million bacterial infections reported in 2018 were resistant to first-line antibiotic treatments. By 2050, that will likely increase to 40%. Globally, AMR could lead to 10 million deaths each year.

 

Dao Nguyen, MD

 

“AMR is an incredibly complex problem that no single approach or solution can solve,” said Dao Nguyen, MD, associate professor of medicine in microbiology and immunology at McGill University and director of the McGill AMR Centre, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

 

In Canada and the United States, antibiotic overprescription is most commonly associated with respiratory infections, Nguyen told Medscape Medical News. Worldwide, pneumonia is the leading cause of infectious deaths and most commonly associated with death due to AMR.

 

“Pneumonias highlight the challenges of not having adequate diagnostic tests to inform accurate and timely clinical decisions and to avoid unnecessary antibiotic use in some settings, but they also highlight the challenge of not having access to appropriate life-saving antibiotics in other settings,” she said. “These two realities reflect the complex, and at times competing, issues underlying the AMR problem.”

 

In 2023, Canada’s federal, provincial, and territorial ministers of health and agriculture released a Pan-Canadian Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance, providing a 5-year blueprint to address and accelerate a nationwide response.

 

A key component of the plan is One Health, an approach launched by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2017 to incorporate human health, animal health, and the environments they share — and look at it from a global angle. That’s why McGill AMR Centre and similar groups across Canada incorporate researchers from multiple disciplines, looking at how primary care physicians diagnose infections, what types of infections are circulating among poultry and cattle, and how to develop new antimicrobial options.

 

“After several decades of complacency, our antibacterial drug development pipeline is inadequate and leaves us poorly equipped for the AMR crisis,” Nguyen said. “However, antimicrobial therapy is an arms race against microbes, which can always evolve to develop resistance. We also need to think outside the box to develop other complementary approaches for treating infectious diseases.”   ..."

 

SEE: Canada Takes One Health Approach to Antimicrobial Resistance 

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/canada-takes-one-health-approach-antimicrobial-resistance-2024a1000lml