- Health Secretary urges countries to sign Call to Action for
united front to tackle antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
- £1.3m additional UK funding to help co-ordinate global
approach.
- Intervention comes ahead of UK’s G7 presidency, with AMR high
on the health agenda.
Health and Social Care Secretary, , will today call for urgent global action in the
fight against AMR as it threatens the modern way of life.
Speaking virtually at the United Nations High-level Interactive
Dialogue on AMR, the Health Secretary will lay bare the danger we
face without a global approach to tackling this threat.
Calling for nations to sign up to the UN Call to Action – which
aims to raise the importance of AMR on the political agenda and
to sustain and strengthen efforts to address AMR at the national,
regional and global levels - the Health Secretary is expected to
say:
“We owe so much of our progress against this deadly disease
to the power and ingenuity of science and modern medicine.
“But if we fail to act on antimicrobial resistance, modern
medicine as we know it can cease to exist.
“And the silent pandemic of AMR could have consequences far
more deadly than Covid.
“In my view, it’s an existential threat as great as climate
change.”
Drug-resistant diseases already cause at least 700,000 deaths
globally each year and in a worst-case scenario, could increase
to 10 million deaths globally per year by 2050 without government
and industry intervention.
The UK spearheaded the first UN high level political declaration
and subsequent resolution on AMR in 2016, and today’s Call to
Action is a rallying cry for world leaders to maintain and
strengthen momentum as part of building back better from
COVID-19.
The Health Secretary will announce £1.3million of recent
additional UK funding, on top of existing commitments, to the
Multi-Partner Trust Fund on AMR (MPTF). The MPTF helps provide
additional support to low- and middle-income country efforts to
address AMR through a coordinated approach.
The UK is determined to use its Presidency of the G7 this year to
bring partners together and take bold new steps on AMR. This is
in addition to supporting initiatives such as the Fleming Fund, a
£265 million UK aid investment, which is currently helping
twenty-four countries develop their surveillance and systems for
infection and AMR.
The Secretary of State is expected to go on to say:
“On behalf of the government of the United Kingdom, I welcome
and fully endorse today’s call to action on AMR, because we have
so much still to do together – learning from the lessons of this
pandemic and learning those lessons quickly.
“Working across human, animal and environmental health to
make sure that we tackle the next pandemic, so generations ahead
of us will have the modern medicine that we are able to benefit
from today.”
In response to this wide-ranging and pervasive threat, the UK
government published a 20-year vision to ‘contain and control’
AMR by 2040, together with a 5-year national action plan in
January 2019. This will help to protect the British people from
what is a regional, national and international threat.
Notes to editors:
- The full text of the speech will be available on gov.uk
shortly after its delivery - expected at 22:30 GMT Thursday 29
April.
- The Fleming Fund is a £265 million UK aid investment to
tackle antimicrobial resistance by supporting low- and
middle-income countries to generate, use and share data on AMR.
The programme is managed by the UK Department of Health and
Social Care.
