Professor Dame Sally Davies, the UK Special Envoy on AMR, and former Chief Medical Officer for England, has warned that the looming threat of drug-resistant infections could surpass even climate change in its potential impact on global health.

Dame Sally Davies has long been a leading voice in the fight against antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Having spent years at the forefront of public health, she has witnessed firsthand how overuse and misuse of antibiotics in humans, animals, and agriculture have led to the rise of superbugs — bacteria that no longer respond to conventional treatments. The consequences of inaction are staggering: routine surgeries, cancer treatments, and even minor infections could soon become perilous without effective antibiotics.

While some progress has been made in England — getting AMR listed on death certificates, cutting agricultural use of antibiotics and ensuring that their use in healthcare settings is appropriate, plus vital UK investment in research — Dame Sally remains deeply concerned that the urgency around AMR is not being met with the action required.

In an interview for ITN Business’ newly-launched programme, ‘Defending our Health: Unravelling Antimicrobial Resistance‘, she discusses the critical need for incentivising the development of new antibiotics, and why the slow response to AMR could lead to a catastrophic rise in untreatable infections. Her message is clear: we need to act now.

 

“We know it’s the third most important underlying cause of death, and that it causes at least 1.3 million deaths directly every year. We’re getting new data about the economics of it, showing that it really is impacting economies across the world. Without new antibiotics, we will move into an apocalyptic phase. The data already shows that more people are dying of AMR than of climate change every year, and it’s going to get worse.”

There’s a new five year national action plan on AMR. What can we expect from that?

“One of the things in our plan is putting into routine practise our pilot, which we did in the English NHS led by NICE and York University, about how we really try and incentivise the production of new antibiotics.

“We piloted a new method where we looked at the value of antibiotics to an individual if they had AMR; but in addition to that, the value to society of having that antibiotic on the pharmacy shelf… a bit like a fire extinguisher. You’ve paid for it. You hope you’ll never need it. But if someone gets [AMR infection], you snuff it out before it spreads… [That cost] to close the ward of the hospital; the hospital damages; the community and our economy… we pay a subscription, which is our fair share of the G7 GDPs for producing a new antibiotic — and then they will give us as little or as much as we need. So, their profit, or their subscription payment, is totally delinked to the amount we use.”

“We all know the more we use, the more we drive resistance. How do I decide if a family member needs to go to the doctor? To get a prescription for a throat infection, I look at the throat. If it’s just red, it’s viral. If I can see patches of exudate (pus), it’s probably bacterial only. The bacterial will need antibiotics.”

It’s going to take international collaboration to make a difference. What role can the UK play in this?

“We need to use the High-Level Meeting on AMR at the United Nations in New York to really get recognition of the importance of AMR. We are negotiating an outcome document which we’re trying to make from the UK very action-focused. So, we are working with other countries to make sure that people understand that first, we should try and prevent infections — so pushing hard for the need for sanitation and clean water in all countries. After that, we want to make sure that people use the guidance of the World Health Organisation (WHO) on what antibiotics to use, the guidance of the Food and Agriculture Organisation on phasing out growth promotion uses, phasing out the use of critical, medically important antibiotics, and really cleaning up the food chain. We know it’s possible.

“If we don’t contain AMR and we don’t get new antibiotics, we lose modern medicine. More people will die of infection than of cancer.”

Sometimes it takes a tragedy, a personal connection to get us on board. You’ve had that experience. What difference does that make?

“My goddaughter died before Christmas in 2023 of AMR. And she knew she was dying. She said I should use her death to explain to people what this means. It’s painful. It got personal for me. But what it also shows is how it’s here in every country… and that people don’t realise that AMR is there. It’s silent. When it gets personal, it redoubles my efforts to really bring this home to people, that we’ve got to do something about it.”

Learn more about AMR in our news-style programme ‘Defending Our Health: Unravelling Antimicrobial Resistance‘ – now LIVE.