The Slow Pandemic: Antimicrobial Resistance

Finish your prescriptions even if you feel well.  Wash your hands.  And get ready for a tough new era of global health: Antimicrobial resistance.  Antibiotics were the greatest heroes of World War 2.  Thanks to this miracle medicine the 2nd world war was the first major conflict where people died of the actual wounds, not of infection.  Praise for antibiotics was so high following World War 2 that it put entire global health literatures of disease prevention and health promotion on the shelf - with the hope that pills would be enough.  And in 2022 we're still overprescribing antibiotic technology from the 1960s and 1970s to people and animals alike.  The consequence?  Bacterium is starting to adapt.  And when it does, as with diseases like tuberculosis, the consequences are horrendous.  Anthony McDonnell is sending a clear warning, that without proper change and action, antimicrobial resistance will impact global health so hard, it will make COVID-19 look like an annoyance.  

Anthony McDonnell is a senior policy analyst at the Center for Global Development (CGD), working to support national decision making and prioritisation of healthcare in Ethiopia through iDSI and as the technical lead for CGD’s working group on Antimicrobial Procurement. Previously, McDonnell led CGD’s work to analyse the COVID-19 vaccine portfolio and a project examining policy interventions to protect the supply chains for pharmaceuticals from COVID-19 induced shocks.

Before joining CGD, McDonnell worked as the Head of Economic Research for the UK’s independent review into antimicrobial resistance (O’Neill Review). Following this, he co-wrote a book with Harvard University Press called Superbugs: An Arms Race against Bacteria. He has also worked as a Senior Health Economist at the University of Oxford studying malaria interventions, and as a research associate at ODI where he led work examining why countries established universal health coverage and how best to get health care to left behind groups.

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