Opinion: Seema Verma: CMS’s ‘expanded pathway’ for new antibiotics can help fight antimicrobial resistance
Antimicrobial resistance is like a hydra — cut off the head of one infection using a drug and another microbe emerges in its place with newly acquired defenses, writes @SeemaCMS.
Americans are under siege by drug-resistant bacteria. The challenge of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR as it is referred to in the medical community, has become a public health crisis. Thousands of deaths every year are attributed to drug-resistant microbes, as well as billions of dollars in health expenditures.
And the problem is only going to get worse, which will certainly be a topic of discussion at this week’s World Antimicrobial Resistance Congress.
Why? In part because front-line antibiotics. Access to new antibiotics today is so limited today that the United States — the land of patient choice — has stuck on waiting lists to get the right drug for their drug-resistant infections.
