The 79th UN General Assembly Adopts a Declaration on Tackling the Threat of Antimicrobial Resistance
On September 26, 2024, a high-level meeting on antimicrobial resistance, held at UN Headquarters in New York, adopted a political declaration in which nations around the world committed to work together on action plans and targets to address the threat of resistance to antimicrobials such as antibiotics.
This can be regarded as a milestone in the field of microbiology. Since Pasteur, the father of microbiology, discovered microorganisms, humanity has gradually invented many antimicrobial drugs to treat the various diseases caused by microbes. These inventions once greatly raised human life expectancy and improved quality of life.
But at the same time, the use of antimicrobial drugs has also driven microbial evolution. More and more microorganisms no longer respond to the antimicrobials humanity has previously used; traditional antimicrobials are failing, and increasing numbers of people are losing their lives to antimicrobial resistance. According to WHO statistics, about 4.95 million people worldwide died in 2019 from causes associated with antimicrobial resistance, and this number is climbing year by year.
Antimicrobial drugs include antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals, and antiparasitics. They are the medicines humans use to prevent and treat diseases caused by infection with bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites and other microbes in humans, animals, and plants. They appear not only widely in modern healthcare systems, serving human health, but also heavily in agriculture: humans use antimicrobials when raising livestock and growing crops in order to increase yields. The abuse of such drugs has driven various microbes to evolve the ability to resist the drugs humans develop, making them increasingly difficult to deal with.
Microbes cause not only infectious diseases but also serious conditions such as schistosomal ascites (caused by schistosomes) and cancer—for example, Helicobacter pylori can induce gastric cancer, hepatitis B virus can induce liver cancer, and Epstein-Barr virus can induce lymphoma, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and several other cancers. Yet the efficacy of the drugs we use against microbes is weakening. H. pylori, which used to be easy to eradicate, is now very difficult to cure; even with the latest quadruple therapy, only about half of patients are eradicated, and the eradication rate is falling year by year.
Thus the antimicrobial resistance crisis has joined the climate crisis, the energy crisis, and the food crisis as one of the major crises affecting people worldwide—and the death toll it causes is among the higher ones. WHO therefore regards antimicrobial resistance as one of the most pressing health challenges facing the world today.
Although nations have jointly pledged to strive, by 2030, to ensure that at least 70% of antimicrobials used for human health worldwide belong to the WHO "ACCESS" class of antimicrobials, and to significantly reduce antimicrobial use in the global agri-food system, it remains to be seen whether these declarations will be implemented. Perhaps restricting antimicrobial use, like humanity's efforts to control pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, will become a long-standing, intractable problem.
If an individual wants to protect themselves as much as possible in this crisis, the best approach is to maintain personal hygiene, keep a regular schedule, balance work and rest, ensure adequate sleep, eat a reasonable diet, and exercise moderately in order to improve physical fitness and strengthen immunity—after all, the human immune system is the best antimicrobial of all.