Antibiotic resistance is poised to be one of the biggest public health challenges of our time, and some experts suggest implementing a global antibiotic use database to address the problem. But with different countries having different capacities for maintaining public health, this would certainly be easier said than done. To address the global epidemic of antibiotic resistance, some experts suggest implementing an international database tracking antibiotic use. What would this system look like, and how could the different capacities of developed and developing countries be integrated?
These are the issues discussed during the debate of a paper written by Drs. Thomas O’Brien and John Stelling, Co-Directors of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Surveillance of Antimicrobial Resistance in Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts. Dr. O'Brien presented the paper, Surveillance of Antibiotic Resistance Gene Epidemics, at the ISGP's conference on Emerging and Persistent Infectious Diseases: Focus on Antimicrobial Resistance, planned and convened by the ISGP in partnership with Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas on March 19–22, 2013.
For more podcasts, visit ISGP’s The Forum and please consider sharing this special episode.
