Op-ed: How AMR is disrupting cancer care across Europe

AMR Action Fund CEO Henry Skinner authored an opinion piece for the summer issue of The Innovation Platform about the ways in which antibiotic-resistant infections are disrupting cancer care across Europe.

This is an emerging area of research, and data remain sparse, coming from a limited number of studies and geographies. Characterising the prevalence of AMR infections is challenging, as is understanding their contribution to mortality, in part because of how deaths are recorded.

In many cases, infections that play a critical role in a patient’s decline are not consistently captured in official mortality data. If a patient with leukaemia dies after developing a serious bacterial infection, is the cause of death attributed to the cancer or the infection? Further complicating matters is that there may not be sufficient information to determine the causative pathogen of the infection and whether it was resistant to treatment. This remains an ongoing challenge across countries. The United Kingdom has taken steps to improve how antimicrobial resistance is recorded on death certificates, which is one way to help researchers better measure the scale of the problem and prioritise solutions.

But the goal is not simply to count these deaths more accurately. It is to prevent them, and that begins by closing gaps at the bedside.

Read the full article here.