New research in three African countries aims to address the growing challenge of antimicrobial resistance.
Opt-AMR (Optimising Antibiotic Usage to Mitigate Antimicrobial Resistance) is a new programme led by Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
AMR to antibiotics is an urgent and growing global health problem, particularly affecting low- and middle-income countries. Overuse as well as misuse of antibiotics are key drivers of AMR, so ensuring that antibiotics are prescribed effectively is critical for patients with life-threatening illnesses to receive appropriate medication while reducing unnecessary prescriptions.
This challenge is compounded by a lack of affordable, accurate, and rapid diagnostics to support effective antibiotic use in local health systems, and rapid surveillance systems to monitor the local spread of AMR.
Alongside healthcare professionals and Ministries of Health in Uganda, Malawi and Zambia, researchers from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ), Makerere University in Uganda, Doctors with Africa (CUAMM) and the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Programme (MLW) will aim to create new strategies to optimise antibiotic use and reduce AMR.
The Opt-AMR project will focus on the antibiotic use by Health Care Practitioners and communities in the care of young children under five years with fevers, a common clinical condition treated in healthcare facilities in sub-Saharan Africa. These children are often given broad-spectrum antibiotics when other diagnostic tests are negative, which risks increasing AMR. The key success factor for this project will be influencing policy change and future education of Health Care Practitioners.
Researchers will test a new AMR surveillance system to monitor resistance to antibiotics used to treat such cases, sampling under-five children, across a range of healthcare facilities to determine the prevalence and severity of AMR.
The project will investigate the relationship between AMR and antibiotic prescribing practices, and with antibiotic use practices in local communities, as well as identifying antibiotics with less likelihood of resistance.
Working in equitable partnership with local communities, healthcare professionals, and policymakers, these findings will help to shape effective strategies to improve quality-of-care and antibiotic use in healthcare facilities and local communities.
Professor Joseph Valadez, Professor of Global Health and co-lead on Opt-AMR, said: “ This project marks a turning point for empowering district management teams and local communities to address the causes of AMR where they live, and to obtain needed surveillance information to inform their strategies.”
Dr Anjali Sharma, Senior Research Technical Advisor at CIDRZ and co-lead on Opt-AMR, said: "This is an exciting project that harnesses expertise from three countries and employs localized approaches to achieve global impact."