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The UK is investing £210m in tracking superbugs in Asia and Africa in hopes of tackling antibiotic resistance before the pathogens reach the UK.
The funding was announced on Wednesday as Health Secretary Steve Barclay traveled to India for his first meeting of G20 health ministers, where discussions will include tackling antimicrobial resistance.
Antibiotic resistance, the phenomenon in which bacteria evolve so that they cannot be wiped out by antibiotics, kills about 1.3 million people a year, and some studies estimate it is deadlier than malaria or HIV.
Barclays said antimicrobial resistance was a “silent killer” that posed a “significant threat” to public health.
He said: “It is critical to stop the spread of the epidemic, and this record funding will enable countries most at risk to respond to it and prevent it from claiming more lives around the world and ultimately putting us at home. safer.”
Antimicrobial resistance killed between 7,000 and 35,000 people in the UK in 2019, according to the government. Experts warn that drug-resistant bacteria could lead to future pandemics and stifle vital treatments that rely on infection control, from surgery to chemotherapy.
Globally, there has been a shortage of new antibiotics as drugmakers have little incentive to invest in the field. Existing generic drugs are inexpensive, and new antibiotics must be used with caution to avoid the development of resistance.
To encourage pharmaceutical companies to develop new medicines, the UK plans to expand its subscription model, in which the government pays pharmaceutical companies a fixed fee for the supply of antibiotics.
Last month, the UK announced its intention to pay up to £20m a year for every antibiotic sold, regardless of how many are prescribed.
Some G20 countries are looking to implement the same subscription model to address market failures, Barclays said.
The U.S. proposed a similar idea in the Pasteur Act, which has yet to pass Congress, while the European Union is looking for other ways to encourage pharmaceutical companies to invest.
But incentives aimed at Western countries do not solve the problem in developing economies, where antibiotics are often overused because they are available without a prescription.
The UK’s latest investment comes from the health sector budget and will support the government’s Fleming Fund, established in 2015, to fight antimicrobial resistance in low- and middle-income countries.
It will fund laboratories, disease surveillance systems and a global workforce to increase surveillance of potentially problematic pathogens in the 25 most threatened countries, including Indonesia, Ghana and Kenya.
The UK will also partner with India on surveillance worth £3m and fund genome-sequencing technology to help rapidly identify drug-resistant pathogens.
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