Using the “access,” “watch,” and “reserve” designations established previously, the World Health Organization (WHO) has created a new tool to limit the use of drugs associated with the highest risk of resistance and to increase the use of antibiotics in countries where supply and availability is low.
The tool, called AWaRe (for Access, Watch, and Reserve), was developed by the WHO Essential Medicines List to reduce the spread of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), antibiotic-related adverse events, and drug costs.
“Antimicrobial resistance is one of the most urgent health risks of our time and threatens to undo a century of medical progress,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, PhD, WHO director-general, in a press release today about AWaRe.
“All countries must strike a balance between ensuring access to life-saving antibiotics and slowing drug resistance by reserving the use of some antibiotics for the hardest-to-treat infections,” he added. “I urge countries to adopt AWaRe, which is a valuable and practical tool for doing just that.”
Speaking at a press conference today, Hanan Balkhy, MD, the WHO’s assistant-director general for AMR, said that AWaRe is only a single tool to combat antimicrobial resistance. But a failure to use this tool, as well as others, including novel antibiotic development, will “halt modern medicine as we know it today.”
Credit: CDC
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