Germs and governance: The past, present and future of hospital infection, prevention and control

By Manchester University Press

Germs and governance brings together leading historians, practitioners and policy makers to consider the past, present and future of hospital infection control. Combining historical case-studies with practitioner experiences, this volume offers a new understanding of the emergence of theories of germ transmission and containment and how these theories played out in real-world environments, networks and professional organisations.

Exploring the historical context in which technologies like gloves were developed and popularised, as well as how relationships between communities and hospitals, doctors and nurses, and the emerging role of hospital bacteriologists have shaped infection control practices, the collection emphasises the diverse contexts in which ideas about germs, infection and safety circulated. The volume also addresses the historical neglect of the critical role of nurses in the development and success of infection control measures.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526140807

Book preview

Germs and governance

Social Histories Of Medicine

Series editors: David Cantor, Elaine Leong and Keir Waddington

Social Histories of Medicine is concerned with all aspects of health, illness and medicine, from prehistory to the present, in every part of the world. The series covers the circumstances that promote health or illness, the ways in which people experience and explain such conditions, and what, practically, they do about them. Practitioners of all approaches to health and healing come within its scope, as do their ideas, beliefs, and practices, and the social, economic and cultural contexts in which they operate. Methodologically, the series welcomes relevant studies in social, economic, cultural, and intellectual history, as well as approaches derived from other disciplines in the arts, sciences, social sciences and humanities. The series is a collaboration between Manchester University Press and the Society for the Social History of Medicine.

Previously published

Migrant architects of the NHS Julian M. Simpson

Mediterranean quarantines, 1750–1914 Edited by John Chircop and Francisco Javier Martínez

Sickness, medical welfare and the English poor, 1750–1834 Steven King

Medical societies and scientific culture in nineteenth-century Belgium Joris Vandendriessche

Vaccinating Britain Gareth Millward

Madness on trial James E. Moran

Early Modern Ireland and the world of medicine Edited by John Cunningham

Feeling the strain Jill Kirby

Rhinoplasty and the nose in early modern British medicine and culture Emily Cock

Communicating the history of medicine Edited by Solveig Jülich and Sven Widmalm

Progress and pathology Edited by Melissa Dickson, Emilie Taylor-Brown and Sally Shuttleworth

Balancing the self Edited by Mark Jackson and Martin D. Moore

Accounting for health: Calculation, paperwork and medicine, 1500–2000 Edited by Axel C. Hüntelmann and Oliver Falk

Women's medicine Caroline Rusterholz

Germs and governance

The past, present and future of hospital infection, prevention and control

Edited by

Anne Marie Rafferty, Marguerite Dupree and Fay Bound Alberti

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2021

While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4078 4 hardback

First published 2021

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Lee Miller, US Army nurse drying sterilised rubber gloves, 1945 (courtesy Lee Miller Archives)

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Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Notes on contributors

Foreword – Professor Dame Sally Davies

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction – Marguerite Dupree, Anne Marie Rafferty and Fay Bound Alberti

I Policy and infection control

1 Hospital infections and the role of the community before MRSA, 1930–1960 – Flurin Condrau

2 Cleanliness costs: the evolving relationship between infection and length of stay in antibiotic-era hospitals – Sally Sheard

II Infection control: Nurses and medical students

3 Pus, pedagogy and practice: how ‘dirt’ shaped surgical nurse training and hierarchies of practice, 1900–1935 – Pamela Wood

4 Septic subjects: infection and occupational illness in British hospitals, c. 1870–1970 – Claire L. Jones

5 Learning the art and science of infection prevention and control: a practical application – Susan Macqueen

III Practice and infection control: Focus on gloves

6 Wax paste and vaccination: alternatives to surgical gloves for infection control, 1880–1945 – Thomas Schlich

7 The evolving role of gloves in healthcare – Jennie Wilson

IV Practice and infection control: In the laboratory

8 Constructing the ‘Sanitary Officer’: the Pathologist’s role in infection prevention and control at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London, 1892–1939 – Rosemary Cresswell

9 Infection control from the laboratory to the clinic: John H. Bowie and the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, c. 1945–1970 – Susan Gardiner

V Into the future

10 Infection prevention and control in the twenty-first century: the era of patient safety – Neil Wigglesworth

11 Infection control and antimicrobial resistance: the past, the present and the future – Alistair Leanord

Conclusion: using the past – Marguerite Dupree, Anne Marie Rafferty and Fay Bound Alberti

Index

Figures

Tables

Notes on contributors

Fay Bound Alberti is a writer and cultural historian, with specialisms in the histories of gender, medicine, emotion and the body. Her books include Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) and A Biography of Loneliness: The History of an Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Fay is currently working on a book about the emotional and cultural histories of face transplants. She is a Future Leaders fellow at the Foundation for Science and Technology, Reader in History and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of York, where she is also Co-director of the Centre for Global Health Histories.

Flurin Condrau is Professor of the History of Medicine at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Previously, he has held positions at the universities of Sheffield and Manchester. He has published widely on the history of infection, with particular focus on cholera, tuberculosis and, more recently, hospital infections. Among his publications are ‘The Patient’s view meets the clinical gaze’, Social History of Medicine, 20, 2007, 525–540 and co-edited volumes Tuberculosis Then and Now (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014) and Therapeutic Revolutions: Pharmaceuticals and Social Change in the Twentieth Century, with Jeremy A. Greene and Elizabeth Siegel Watkins (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Rosemary Cresswell’s first book, Bacteria in Britain, 1880–1939 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), investigated the use of bacteriology in hospitals, workplaces and local communities, and her PhD on this topic was funded by the AHRC. Recently funded projects include ‘Crossing Boundaries: The History of First Aid in Britain and France, 1909–1989’, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. In connection with this project, she is writing the history of the British Red Cross and was awarded a Bodleian Libraries Sassoon Visiting Fellowship in 2017 in order to research sections relating to war, health and humanitarianism. She has also published research relating to the history of colonial nursing. Rosemary has held postdoctoral research roles at the University of Oxford and at King’s College London, and a temporary lectureship at Imperial College London, and between 2012 and 2020 was Senior Lecturer in Global History at the University of Hull. Rosemary recently joined the University of Warwick as a Research Fellow. She has formerly published as Rosemary Wall.

Marguerite Dupree has been a core staff member of the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Glasgow since 1986 and Professor of Social and Medical History. She is co-author with Anne Crowther of Medical Lives in the Age of Surgical Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). She was co-organiser (with Brian Hurwitz) of a conference in 2012 to mark the centenary of Lister’s death, and co-editor of a special issue, ‘Learning from Lister’, of Notes and Records of the Royal Society. Most recently, she has been co-holder, with Anne Marie Rafferty, of a Leverhulme Trust project grant for research into the history of infection control in British hospitals, c. 1870–1970. Among her other books and articles are publications on the history of hydropathic establishments, on medical practitioners and the business of life assurance, and on issues of service integration in the National Health Service (NHS), 1948–1974. She is also the author of books and articles on family history – Family Structure in the Staffordshire Potteries 1840–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) – and on the history of government-industry relations in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (editor, Lancashire and Whitehall: The Diary of Sir Raymond Streat, 1931–1957, 2 vols (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987).

Susan Gardiner graduated PhD in the History of Medicine in November 2017. Based in the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Glasgow, Susan was a key member of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project entitled ‘From microbes to matrons: infection control in British hospitals, c. 1870–1970’, working alongside a project team comprising scholars from both the University of Glasgow and King’s College London. Susan’s research focused on infection control practice in Scottish hospitals in the early ‘antibiotic era’, c. 1928–1970. Using the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh as case studies, she undertook extensive archival research which she combined with oral histories. In addition to submitting her thesis within the three-year timeframe, Susan disseminated her research findings through journal publications. She also presented at six academic conferences held in world-leading institutions and in overseas locations during her studies.

Claire L. Jones is a lecturer in the History of Medicine at the University of Kent. Her research centres on the cultural, economic and social history of medicine and health in Britain post-1750, with particular emphases on the relationship between medicine and commerce, and ways in which this relationship affects professional social structures, consumption and material culture. She has published numerous articles on this topic, and her first monograph on the development of medical industry in Britain is The Medical Trade Catalogue in Britain, 1870–1914 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013). Between 2014 and 2016, she was also Research Associate on the ‘From microbes to matrons’ Leverhulme-funded project, where her research focused on the ways in which systems of wound infection control affected professional structures, doctor-nurse relationships and hospital practices.

Alistair Leanord is a medical microbiologist at Glasgow Royal Infirmary and Director of the Scottish Microbiology Laboratories, Glasgow, who has a research interest in healthcare-associated infections and antimicrobial resistance using genome sequencing, informatics and interventional infection control. This work has led to the formation of the Scottish HAI Prevention Institute (SHAIPI). He has been recognised by the University of Glasgow where he is Honorary Professor of Microbiology. Previously, over the last five years, he was the HAI Medical Adviser to the Scottish government, advising and implementing Scotland’s response to the UK antimicrobial resistance (AMR) strategy. Currently he is Chair of the UK Advisory Committee on Antimicrobial Prescribing, Resistance and Healthcare Associated Infection (APRHAI).

Susan Macqueen has been in infection prevention and control (IPC) since 1980 and, until her retirement in 2011, was Director of IPC at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust, London. She has worked at the UK Department of Health (1989) and been a member of the Expert Advisory Panel to the National Audit Office on the Management and Control of Hospital Acquired Infection in Acute Trusts in England (1998), the Expert Advisory Panel on the Department of Health Communicable Disease Strategy (1998), the Department of Health CJD Incidents Panel (2000–2003), the Advisory Group on the National Guidelines for the Prevention of Hospital Acquired Infection – EPIC Study (1998–2003) and the Department of Health Select Committee on Antimicrobial Resistance – SACAR (2001–2005). Susan was Chair of the Infection Control Nurses Association (ICNA, now Infection Prevention Society) from 1997 to 2000 and has been a national and international advocate for best practice in HCAI. Her sharing of work in programmes in Europe as well as Jordan, Oman, Russia and Japan has aimed at improving standards of practice in reducing HCAI. She was awarded an OBE in 1999 for her work in IPC. Publications include The Great Ormond Street Hospital Manual of Children’s Nursing Practices with Elizabeth Anne Bruce and Faith Gibson (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2012) and The Children’s Nurse: The True Story of a Great Ormond Street Nurse (London: Orion, 2013). Susan continues to teach Management of Healthcare Acquired Infections on an MSc online module at Greenwich University, London.

Dame Anne Marie Rafferty is Professor of Nursing Policy, former Dean of the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, King’s College London and President of the Royal College of Nursing. She is a historian and health workforce and policy researcher. She served on the Prime Minister’s Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery, 2009-10 and has been recipient of various awards: Nursing Times Leadership Award (2014); Health Services Journal Top 100 Clinical Leaders Award in 2015; 2017 nominated as one of 70 most influential nurses in the 70 years of the National Health Service. She co-led a Student Commission on the Future of the NHS supported by NHS England and was a member of the Parliamentary Review of Health and Social Care in Wales, 2018. She was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences 2019 and Member of the National Academy of Medicine in the US in 2020. She was PI of the project ‘From Microbes to Matrons’ with Marguerite Dupree. Her publications span a textbook with Robert Dingwall and Charles Webster, her DPhil supervisor, An Introduction to the Social History of Nursing (London: Routledge, 1988); a monograph, The Politics of Nursing Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1996); co-authored Nurses of all Nations with Barbara Brush, Joan Lynaugh, Meryn Stuart and Nancy Tomes (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1999); and edited collections with Jane Robinson and Ruth Elkan on Nursing, History and the Politics of Welfare (London: Routledge, 1996), Hilary Marland, Midwives, Society and Childbirth (London: Routledge, 1997) and Sioban Nelson, Notes on Nightingale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010).

Thomas Schlich, MD, is James McGill Professor in the History of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Canada, Department of Social Studies of Medicine. He has double qualification as physician and historian and has held previous research and research teaching positions in Cambridge, England, and in Stuttgart and Freiburg, Germany. Thomas’ research interests include the history of modern medicine and science (eighteenth to twenty-first centuries), medicine and technology, surgery and body history. His previous books include The Origins of Organ Transplantation: Surgery and Laboratory Science, 1880–1930 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2010); Surgery, Science and Industry: A Revolution in Fracture Care, 1950s–1990s (Houndmills and New York: Palgrave, 2002). Thomas is editor of The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and is currently working on a monograph on the history of modern surgery, 1800–1914.

Sally Sheard is the Andrew Geddes and John Rankin Professor of Modern History at the University of Liverpool, with a primary research interest in the interface between expert advisers and policymakers. She is currently leading a seven-year Wellcome Trust-funded project, ‘The Governance of Health: Medical, Economic and Managerial Expertise in Britain since 1948’. Her latest book is The Passionate Economist: How Brian Abel-Smith Shaped Global Health and Social Welfare (Bristol: Policy Press, 2013). She has also written on the history of hospitals, the finance of British medicine and the development of the NHS. Sally has extensive experience of using history in public and policy engagement and has worked with local health authorities and government organisations. She has written for and presented television and radio programmes, including the 2018 BBC Radio 4 series National Health Stories.

Neil Wigglesworth qualified as a nurse in 1987, and following a clinical career primarily in critical care nursing, he moved into the field of IPC in 1995. Neil has worked in a number of nurse specialist, management, research and nurse consultant roles in the speciality as well as in Public Health/Health Protection and was appointed to the role of Deputy Director, IPC at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust in March 2015 and Director in January 2019. Neil is the immediate past President of the Infection Prevention Society, current Chair of the International Federation of Infection Control and a former editor of the Journal of Infection Prevention. He has a particular interest in Quality Improvement approaches and in particular, Human Factors/Ergonomics (HFE).

Jennie Wilson has a first degree in microbiology, a master’s in Public Health and a PhD in surveillance and is a registered nurse. She has thirty years’ experience in IPC. She has worked as a senior IPC practitioner in NHS Trusts in London and was a key player in establishing the first national surveillance programmes on HCAI in England at the Health Protection Agency. She led the Surgical Site Infection Surveillance Service for ten years and developed HCAI surveillance and research initiatives in the United Kingdom and Europe. Jennie is currently Professor of Healthcare Epidemiology at the Richard Wells Research Centre at the University of West London. She is a lead author of the Epic guidelines on the preventing HCAI, and her research interests include prevention of HCAI, in particular urinary tract and respiratory tract infections, dehydration in the elderly, hand hygiene and the use of clinical gloves. She has published widely on many aspects of HCAI and is author of Infection Control in Clinical Practice, now in its third edition.

Pamela Wood is a retired nurse academic. Her career in New Zealand and Australia focused on teaching research to postgraduate students in a broad range of health professions and developing a research culture in schools of nursing and health. She is known internationally, particularly for her research in nursing history, and has published extensively on the history of nursing and health. Pamela’s PhD in History from the University of Otago explored the meaning of ‘dirt’ in nineteenth-century colonial New Zealand and the way this shaped people’s understanding of how a healthy, civilised settlement should be formed. Pamela’s contributed chapter in Germs and Governance extends this exploration of the meaning of ‘dirt’ to the early twentieth-century world of the surgical nurse and efforts in infection control. Pamela is currently writing a cultural history explaining what it meant to be a New Zealand nurse at the time of empire, 1880–1950.

Foreword

Long before the global Coronavirus pandemic began in January 2020, it was clear that infection control continues to be one of the twenty-first century’s most challenging health problems. Throughout my nine years as Chief Medical Officer (CMO) for England and the Chief Medical Advisor to the UK government I stressed the growing dangers of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and I am proud to continue to serve as the United Kingdom’s special envoy on AMR, working to build on global momentum on AMR.

This volume, in bringing together historians, healthcare professionals and policymakers, is prescient in its emphasis on the whole range of infection prevention and control (IPC) policies and procedures used to minimise the risk of spreading infections in hospitals and healthcare facilities, in addition to drug therapies. A historical perspective reveals the continuing importance of a broad spectrum of IPC practices, technologies and personnel – from handwashing to personal protective equipment to all levels of hospital staff. Because cures are limited, the need to devote adequate resources to all aspects of IPC emerges clearly from the following pages, just as much as the need to fund the search for new classes of antibiotics and vaccines.

Germs and Governance captures a crucial transition in understanding IPC policies in health history since the mid-nineteenth century, including first, the growing recognition of the role of microbes in creating infection and disease, and second, an emphasis on managing microbes, in which the governance arrangements of the hospital and healthcare providers play a prominent, yet little studied, role in mediating policy and practice. The volume offers the integration of historical and contemporary evidence, and a plurality of voices and experiences in hospital infection control, which give the book a greater range and scope than the existing literature. It looks beyond the antimicrobial drug revolution to focus on the other technologies and personnel of infection control. One key example is the history of nursing education and practice, which is a neglected aspect of research into infection control, but there are other examples including the roles of economics, standardisation, national governments and ideas of ‘dirt’ and ‘blame’. Other topics include the long history of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and its community origins; case studies of resistance to and rationales for the use of surgical gloves; the reciprocal roles of bacteriologists, pathologists and matrons in managing infection control; occupational health of hospital staff; high-level and micro politics of research into patient safety and case studies of early nursing practice of hygiene, neonatal intensive care and paediatrics in the 1980s; and the rise of disposables, central supply and sustainability.

The geographic focus here is on England and Scotland, but the contributors writing before the COVID-19 pandemic recognise that, as emphasised in my final annual report as CMO, infection prevention and control is a global issue. They make wider comparative references to other countries, including the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

There cannot be a more pressing moment to engage with this subject and look back in order to take forward the learning and lessons for the future.

Professor Dame Sally Davies

May 2020

Acknowledgements

This book arose from a two-day symposium, ‘From microbes to matrons: the past, present and future of hospital infection control and prevention’, held at the Royal College of Surgeons of England and King’s College London. The symposium brought together thirty policymakers, health professionals and historians from the United Kingdom and abroad. The editors would like to thank all of the participants and all who presented papers; they are especially indebted to the enterprise and energy of Dr Claire L. Jones, who organised the symposium, and to Clare Hitchcox, who assisted her, and to the Wellcome Trust Small Grants Scheme and the Society for the Social History of Medicine for funding for the symposium. We are particularly grateful to the eleven contributors who developed their papers into the following chapters, to the anonymous referees who made this a better book and to David Cantor, the editor for the Social Histories of Medicine Series, for his encouragement and patience, steering the journey from symposium to book. The support of the team at Manchester University Press, including Thomas Dark and Lucy Burns, has been exemplary. Finally, we thank Professor Dame Sally Davies for her Foreword.

This symposium and book are part of a project, ‘From microbes to matrons: infection control in British hospitals, 1870–1970’, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (RPG-2013–157) awarded to two of the editors, Professors Anne Marie Rafferty and Marguerite Dupree. They would like to record their thanks to King’s College London and the University of Glasgow for jointly hosting the project and especially to the Leverhulme Trust for the award which made it possible to bring together the research team of Drs Claire L. Jones, Susan Gardiner and Iain Hutchison, subsequently joined by Drs Julie Hipperson, Agnes Arnold-Forster and Fay Bound Alberti. It has been a pleasure to work with each of the members of the team. We thank them for their hard work, dedication and good humour. We are also grateful to the members of the project’s advisory board who both met formally with the project team and provided informal advice: Professors Roger Kneebone and Flurin Condrau, and Drs Rosemary Cresswell and Carol Pellowe.

In addition, much deserved thanks go to Professor Malcolm Nicolson for his co-supervision of Susan Gardiner’s PhD thesis; the members of the Centre for the History of Medicine and Economic and Social History Subject Area for a congenial, supportive academic home, and the School of Social and Political Sciences for administrative support at Glasgow University; and the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care and administration at King’s College London.

We would also like to thank archivists and librarians for their invaluable assistance, including Alistair Tough, the NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde Archivist, for his expert guidance through the resources in his care; the staff of the Glasgow University Archives and Special Collections; the Lothian Health Services Archive; the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Science Museum, London; the London Metropolitan Archives; the Wellcome Library; the interview collections in the Royal College of Nursing and Kingston University; and Dr Geoff Browell, Head of Archives and Research Collections, and staff at King’s College London, who not only facilitated use of the collections but also hosted our online exhibition.

Finally, Dr Fay Bound Alberti stepped into the role of co-editor with boundless enthusiasm, breadth of expertise, skill and dexterity in attention to detail. Our heartfelt thanks go to her for her patience, generosity and support for the project despite many calls on her time.

Anne Marie Rafferty and Marguerite Dupree

May 2020

List of abbreviations

Introduction

Marguerite Dupree, Anne Marie Rafferty and Fay Bound Alberti

Infection control and antimicrobial resistance: a global problem and its narrative

Infection prevention and control is one of the twenty-first century’s most challenging problems, as indicated by global concerns about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – a danger, according to many, comparable in size and complexity to climate change and warfare.¹

The idea of a ‘therapeutic revolution’ – beginning with the development and increasing availability of ‘miracle’ drugs, that is sulpha drugs in the 1930s and antibiotics in the 1940s, to prevent and treat bacterial infection,² and ending in their declining efficacy and the failure to develop any new classes of antibiotics since the 1980s – is the subject of a large body of literature. Neither the recent emphasis on contemporaries’ awareness of resistance to these drugs since their discovery, represented by Alexander Fleming’s warning in his 1945 Nobel Prize acceptance speech,³ nor recognition that it was a convoluted process, undermined the linear narrative ‘from utopia to dystopia’.⁴

This narrative has become so ubiquitous that there is now a large number of studies about the rise of AMR aimed explicitly at a lay audience, demonstrating how high profile and highly emotive the issue has become.⁵ This fear of ‘superbugs’ and politics of disgust harmonises with the ‘affective turn’ today.⁶ The importance and power of the collective memory and the lived experience of patients, family and staff touched by the consequences of AMR have been moving to the fore, and are now the touchstone for scholarly accounts, news reports, television documentaries and the ability of hospitals and healthcare communities to develop new processes.⁷ Taken together with the continuing interest from healthcare practitioners in understanding the origins of the present situation, this represents the emergence of a cultural perspective on infection prevention and control that stretches beyond the normal emphasis on the biomedical nature of infection. The main theme running through this literature and commentary is the desire to understand both how we have reached the current situation where resistance to these ‘miracle drugs’ is so dangerous, and where it will lead us in the future.

A similar narrative underlies the emergence of AMR as a global and national policy issue. Following the lead of the European Union (EU) internationally in addressing AMR with a monitoring and surveillance approach and an action plan in 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) published its own action plan in 2015, and in 2016 a United Nations (UN) declaration to combat AMR was signed by 193 countries, confirming the importance of the problem and the rise of AMR as a global policy issue; the UN published a follow-up report in 2019.⁸ At the national level, although Brexit now threatens the loss of EU safety controls, surveillance and innovations in this area,⁹ the United Kingdom (UK) was an early follower of the EU. The UK developed a five-year plan for 2013–2018 to set a course of action to try to tackle multiple components of AMR; it commissioned an independent review on AMR