The AMR DetecTool will provide an enormous opportunity for health systems to save costs on the treatment of infected patients. Below is a short summary on the global financial burden of AMR – a burden that the AMR project is determined to alleviate. The summary is based on a study of the Word Bank, which puts a price tag on AMR’s destructive impacts on the global economy from 2017 through 2050, if adequate measures aren’t taken to contain the AMR threat.

Since their use began some 70 years ago, antimicrobials have saved hundreds of millions of lives. However, in recent decades, overuse and misuse of antimicrobials have caused AMR emergence and spread resulting in increasing mortality and rising medical costs and losses pointing far beyond the health sector. If this trend continues, humanity may face a reversal of the public-health gains of the past century, and the economic growth, development, and poverty reduction these gains enabled.

According to World Bank economic simulation tools even with the scenario of low AMR impacts by 2050, annual global gross domestic product (GDP) would likely fall by 1.1 percent, the shortfall exceeding $1 trillion annually after 2030. The high AMR-impact scenario shows even more shocking numbers, indicating that the world will lose 3.8 percent of its annual GDP by 2050, with an annual shortfall of $3.4 trillion by 2030. The annual reduction in global GDP caused by AMR could be as large as the losses of the 2008–2009 global financial crisis, but the damage could last longer and affect low-income countries the most. As AMR spreads, health care expenditures, both public and private, will increase in step with the rising disease burden; by 2050 the annual costs may exceed the base-case level by some 25 percent in low-income countries, 15 percent in middle-income countries, and 6 percent in high income countries.

The analysis of the World Bank Group shows that action on AMR constitutes one of the highest-yield development investments available to countries today. Assuming that 50 percent of AMR costs can be avoided by containment efforts from 2017 to 2050, AMR investments of just $0.2 trillion will bring cumulative global benefits between $10 trillion and $27 trillion during this period, while rates of return on AMR control investments may range from 31 percent to 88 percent annually. Middle-income and high-income countries will derive the largest economic rewards, in absolute and per-capita terms, from successful AMR containment.

The report proposes viable solutions and actions countries can initiate along the objective of WHO’s Global Action Plan on AMR (WHO 2015), developed in collaboration with the World Animal Health Organisation (OIE) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and also introduces how the World Bank Group can support these endeavours.

(source: documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/323311493396993758/final-report)

Acrticle courtesy of Réka Kovács