PROOFS, PANDEMICS, AND POSITIVES
Today, for the first time, I will actually get my hands around a printed copy of The Waiting Rooms.
I can’t tell you how exciting that is, for a debut author. It is the ultimate evidence that what you have written is actually going to make it into the hands of readers. It’s no coincidence that it’s called a proof.
This early print run will now find its way onto the desks of bloggers, authors, overseas publishers and members of the press. If I’m lucky, they will like it. The subject of antibiotic resistance is certainly timely. Then the next stage of this book’s journey will begin.
With the advent of the latest coronavirus, many of us are contemplating medical disasters and disease closer to home. While China locks down its cities and attempts to build a new hospital in five days, the US has already confirmed its first two cases, and Public Health England says that cases in the UK are ‘highly likely’. The international community are now agonising over lockdowns of their own.
I went to two rather terrifying talks by epidemiologists last year. (Yes, I do have an unhealthy interest in death and disease.) They made it clear that it was only a matter of time before the next SARS or MERS would emerge: both were coronaviruses and neither had a vaccine or a cure. Fortunately, the Covid-19 coronavirus appears to have a much lower mortality rate than SARS. So far.
While this outbreak was gathering pace, important discussions were taking place at the World Economic Forum this week. In between the political and trade wranglings, leaders convened on critical global issues, like climate change. And antimicrobial resistance.
In one such panel, industry leaders, government officials, academics and foundations discussed the broken business model for antibiotics. Which is just as well, as two reports, just released by the World Health Organisation on the number of viable new antibiotics currently in development, make grim reading.
Imagine if infections we regard as commonplace became untreatable: skin infections, gut infections, respiratory infections. It would be the equivalent of multiple SARS pandemics breaking out in every country in the world.
“Never has the threat of antimicrobial resistance been more immediate and the need for solutions more urgent. ”
The WHO director general went on to say that efforts to discover new antibiotics were “insufficient to tackle the challenge of increasing emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance”.
The Davos panel made no bones about it: antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the biggest public health threats the world is facing, and drug-resistant infections have the potential to undermine all that has been achieved in modern medicine. And yet, no new classes of antibiotics have been developed since the 1980s.
But amongst this bleak assessment is hope. I was struck by one of the panellist’s comments:
“The climate crisis is a huge problem that we don’t really know how to solve. Antimicrobial resistance is a huge problem that we know how to solve, the only problem is that the market model is broken.”
And these experts know how to crack it. There are innovative funding models for research and development being trialled in different markets right now, including in the UK. The issue is, persuading other governments and corporations to come on board, when they have a host of short term priorities that they consider more pressing.
As we have seen with climate change, the complexity and long-term nature of these challenges often lead to inertia. And that’s where we come in. If voters care about an issue enough, politicians will care, too. AMR needs public engagement. It needs a Greta. So we can push this one right to the top of the to-do list, where it belongs.