The Lancet 2024: Antimicrobial resistance survivors: calling the world to action
Antimicrobial resistance survivors: calling the world to action
"...Beyond the statistics of AMR, a crucial aspect often hidden from the public is the individual stories and voice of AMR survivors and their caregivers.* We want the world to not only think of us as numbers affected by AMR but also to see us as daughters, sisters, brothers, and sons and hear our plea for change, as we shared in our recently launched campaign and our recommendations for meaningful patient engagement in the AMR agenda."
*Personal accounts of the 12 AMR survivor taskforce members
"We represent
- a young university student in India who developed extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis and who had to search for treatment and struggle through 2 years of therapy;
- the carer of a 65-year-old Lebanese woman who developed a multidrug resistant (MDR) Escherichia coli urinary tract infection (UTI) after surgery and continues to have recurrent infection in a setting where health systems are collapsing due to economic crises and UTIs and AMR continue to disproportionately affect women;
- a young woman with cystic fibrosis from Virginia, USA, with chronic MDR Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection;
- the carer of an older woman in the UK with a chronic genetic condition affecting her lungs, leading to multiple MDR P aeruginosa lung infections and resulting in many hospitalisations and a near-death experience; and
- a young student who was born with HIV in Zimbabwe who was diagnosed late and who developed drug-resistant HIV infection.
We also represent the multiple faces of delayed diagnosis—
- eg, due to scarce resources leading to multiple hip surgeries after a hospital-acquired MDR infection in a Kenyan veterinarian,
- a Nigerian hospital pharmacy director who was hospitalised for kidney stones and developed both COVID-19 and an MDR E coli UTI while hospitalised, and
- a young father whose son died as intensivists kept using broader antimicrobials and missed the needed diagnostics that might have changed the course.
We represent
- an unexpected and severe Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infection in a young award-winning gymnast from North Carolina, USA, whose diagnosis was delayed despite her outreach to athletic trainers, a student health clinic, and a local emergency department, and
- a South African who overcame a similar Methicillin-resistant S aureus bone infection that caused substantial damage to her face due to poor care coordination, poor communication, and delayed diagnostics.
And as drug resistance spans beyond viral and bacterial infections, we also represent all those inflicted with a difficult-to-treat fungal infection, such as
- a husband and father from California, USA, who developed coccidioidomycosis that disseminated to his CNS."