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A research hub for antibiotics resistance
News:
- Denmark has announced to create an international research centre focused on the fight against resistance to antibiotics.
Important Facts:
- Denmark signed a memorandum of understanding in Seattle, US, with the international network of research centres CGIAR, to establish the centre.
- The International Centre for Interdisciplinary Solutions on AMR (Antimicrobial Resistance), financed by Denmark and private investors, will open in 2019 and is expected to employ up to 500 people.
- Data: In 2016, 4,90,000 people developed a resistance to antibiotics, according to figures from the World Health Organisation.
- The growing problem causes 33,000 deaths in Europe each year, a recent study by the Stockholm-based European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) said.
- The burden of these infections is comparable to that of influenza, tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS combined, according to ECDC.
- About Anti-microbial resistance:
- Discovered in the 1920s, antibiotics have saved tens of millions of lives by defeating bacterial diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis and meningitis.
- But over the decades, bacteria have learned to fight back, building resistance to the same drugs that once reliably vanquished them.
- The World Health Organisation has repeatedly warned the world is running out of effective antibiotics and urged governments and big pharma companies in 2017 to create a new generation of drugs to fight ultra-resistant supergerms.
- Bacteria can become resistant when patients use antibiotics they do not need or do not finish a course of treatment, giving the half-defeated bug a chance to recover and build immunity.