Team:Sheffield/episode4
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The 5 Year Plan
Antibiotic resistance is clearly a problem that needs to be tackled on a global scale. However, global plans do not consider the more detailed aspects of tackling the problem, whereas national strategies have this at their core. The UK government is adopting the five year antimicrobial resistance (AMR) strategy; a collaboration between a host of organisations from the Government Departments for Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), and the National Health Service (NHS) as well as the Ministry of Defence.
Together these organisations set out a number of action points for seeing a reduction in antibiotic resistance over the next 5 years, beginning from 2013.
The report listed the following as targets:
- Good infection prevention and control measures to help prevent infections occurring become the norm in all sectors of human and animal health,
- Infections can be diagnosed quickly and the right treatment used,
- Patients and animal keepers fully understand the importance of antibiotic treatment regimens and adhere to them,
- Surveillance is in place which quickly identifies new threats or changing patterns in resistance,
- There is a sustainable supply of new, effective antimicrobials.
The government is also calling for quick diagnosis of infections in tackling antibiotic resistance - we feel we could answer this call with our device.
The Rapid Diagnostics Steering Committee Interview
To design our device according to the requirements of the UK government, we consulted a member of the AMR Rapid Diagnostics Steering subgroup, David Oglesby. Below is what we learned from our time with him.
David Oglesby,
Clinical Fellow and member of the Rapid Diagnostics Steering Group
According to David Oglesby, a device like ours would significantly aid national and global governments in combating antibiotic resistance. Our device uses the biomarker lipocalin-2, which is produced by a host in response to bacterial infections and is not pathogen-specific. Our device is unable to differentiate between different bacterial infections, and so we asked Mr. Oglesby if this is a limitation.
His response was “Absolutely not. When you look at the reports around that say where antibiotic resistance is coming from... one of the biggest [issues] you still find is that people [are receiving] antibiotics when [they have] viral infections…”
Furthermore, Mr. Oglesby said that the device would have to be accurate enough to give doctors confidence in the results, and should ideally be correct >85% of the time.
This conversation gave us a clear validation of the concept of our device, and also gave us a target accuracy of >85% to work towards.
