ATLANTA - Preventing antimicrobial resistance
“We all think of the hospital as a safe haven – a place where we go to be healed. If we get an infection, we are secure in the thought that antibiotics will cure us. But what if, all of a sudden, the medicine doesn’t work?
“It’s a horror,” says George Potter, a CDC Foundation donor. “You go into the hospital with something simple and catch an infection that might kill you. Bacteria keep mutating – doing an end run around antibiotics,” says Potter, who established an endowment fund to prevent antibiotic resistance.
Julie Gerberding, M.D., M.P.H., acting deputy director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases at CDC says, “Antimicrobial resistance is a critically important health issue. We are alarmed at the speed with which resistance is developing and spreading. Not only are bacteria becoming resistant to single drugs - they’re becoming multidrug-resistant. And that’s created the current crisis.”
One of the main causes of antimicrobial resistance is the overuse and misuse of drugs. “Physicians have to change their habits,” says Jyoti Somani, M.D., assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Emory University School of Medicine. “Patients want to walk out of the doctor’s office with a prescription in hand, but they may not have a bacterial illness. We need to prescribe carefully and only when appropriate. Also, broad spectrum antibiotics should not be used for simple infections.”
In response to the emerging public health problem of antimicrobial resistance, CDC experts are developing “12-step programs” - a series of health communications campaigns to help prevent the emergence and spread of resistant infections among patients in health care settings. Each 12-step program targets clinicians responsible for the care of a specific population; for example, hospitalized adults, dialysis patients, or critical care patients.
“The 12-step programs reflect a new multi-targeted approach to how the problem of antimicrobial resistance is viewed and tackled,” says Susan McCarthy, a CDC Foundation fellow who serves as the health communications specialist for the 12-step programs. “The programs package existing health care guidelines and recommendations as simplified steps that clinicians can easily remember and put into action.” The first of these programs - addressing antimicrobial resistance in hospitalized adults - is a partnership between the CDC Foundation and CDC, with support from Pharmacia Corporation and the Potter endowment.
“The CDC Foundation has brokered an important alliance,” says Cameron Durrant, M.D., vice president, infectious diseases, at Pharmacia Corporation.
“This 12-step program goes a long way to address one of the most crucial issues in public health, which includes the appropriate use of antibiotics. That is, choosing the most effective antibiotic first to treat bacterial infections.”
The program has four strategies: preventing infection, diagnosing and treating infection effectively, using antimicrobials wisely, and preventing transmission.
“I’m excited about what the CDC Foundation is doing,” says Dr. Somani. “Education is absolutely vital. If physicians stop over-prescribing and patients stop over-using, the genes that confer resistance to antibiotics will be turned off. The normal bacteria which live in our bodies will be able to reestablish their strongholds. And antibiotics - the ‘magic bullet’ we’ve been blessed with for 60 years - will not lose their power. I’m very encouraged to see the CDC Foundation undertaking this effort.”
George Potter agrees. “I set up an endowment fund at the CDC Foundation because this is something worth fighting,” he says.