The White House National Action Plan1 to meet the rising tide of drug-resistant bacteria includes the following goals and strategies:
Goal 1: Slow the Emergence of Resistant Bacteria and Prevent the Spread of Resistant Infections.
• Implement public health programs and reporting policies that advance antibiotic-resistance prevention and foster antibiotic stewardship in healthcare settings and the community.
• Eliminate the use of medically important antibiotics for growth promotion in food-producing animals and bring other agricultural uses of antibiotics for treatment, control, and prevention of disease, under veterinary oversight.
Goal 2: Strengthen National One-Health Surveillance Efforts to Combat Resistance Objectives.
• Create a regional public health laboratory network to strengthen national capacity to detect resistant bacterial strains and a specimen repository to facilitate development and evaluation of diagnostic tests and treatments.
• Expand and strengthen the national infrastructure for public health surveillance and data reporting, and provide incentives for timely reporting of antibiotic resistance and use in all healthcare settings.
• Develop, expand, and maintain capacity in state and federal veterinary and food safety laboratories to conduct antibiotic susceptibility testing and characterize select zoonotic and animal pathogens.
• Enhance monitoring of antibiotic resistance patterns, as well as antibiotic sales, usage, and management practices, at multiple points in the production chain for food animals and retail meat.
Goal 3: Advance Development and Use of Rapid and Innovative Diagnostic Tests for Identification and Characterization of Resistant Bacteria.
• Develop and validate new diagnostics — including tests that rapidly distinguish between viral and bacterial pathogens and tests that detect antibiotic resistance — that can be implemented easily in a wide range of settings.
• Expand availability and use of diagnostics to improve treatment of antibiotic-resistant infections, enhance infection control, and facilitate outbreak detection and response in healthcare and community settings.
Goal 4: Accelerate Research to Develop New Antibiotics, Other Therapeutics, Vaccines, and Diagnostics Objectives.
• Conduct research to enhance understanding of environmental factors that facilitate the development of antibiotic resistance and the spread of resistance genes that are common to animals and humans.
• Increase research focused on understanding the nature of microbial communities, how antibiotics affect them, and how they can be harnessed to prevent disease.
• Intensify research and development of new therapeutics and vaccines, first-in-class drugs, and new combination therapies for treatment of bacterial infections.
• Develop non-traditional therapeutics and innovative strategies to minimize outbreaks caused by resistant bacteria in human and animal populations.
Goal 5: Improve International Collaboration and Capacities for Prevention, Surveillance and Antibiotic Research and Development.
• Promote laboratory capability to identify at least three of the seven WHO priority antimicrobial-resistant pathogens using standardized, reliable detection assays.
• Collaborate with WHO, OIE, [World Organisation for Animal Health] and other international efforts focused on the development of integrated, laboratory based surveillance to detect and monitor antibiotic-resistance in relevant animal and human foodborne pathogens.
• Develop a mechanism for international communication of critical events that may signify new resistance trends with global public and animal health implications.
• Promote international collaboration and public-private partnerships to incentivize development of new therapeutics to counter antibiotic resistance, including new, next-generation, and other alternatives to antibiotics, vaccines, and affordable, rapidly deployable, point-of-need diagnostics.
• Support countries to develop and implement national plans to combat antibiotic resistance and strategies to enhance antimicrobial stewardship.
REFERENCE
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The White House. National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria. March 2015. http://1.usa.gov/1yiurjQ.
