PM's five-point 'action plan'

News Desk: Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has unveiled a five-point 'Action Plan' to effectively fight antimicrobial resistance (AMR). "Failure to address this disaster could lead to more serious epidemics in the future," he said. In a statement issued before a high-level interactive dialogue on AMR in New York on Thursday (April 29), the Prime Minister said, "The world is now grappling with the dreaded Covid-19 epidemic and AMR could become a more deadly epidemic in the future." The Prime Minister also said that failure to deal with such dangers in time would result in huge loss of human life, animals and plants. As a follow-up to the 75th session of the UN General Assembly, President Volkan Bozki called for a dialogue entitled "Political Declaration of the High-Level Meeting on Universal Health Coverage". Sheikh Hasina said the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that one crore people will die from AMR every year by 2050.

Citing the WHO forecast, he added that the financial loss of AMR would be in the billions of dollars, which would hamper progress in achieving the Food Safety and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and universal health coverage. Against this background, the Prime Minister of Bangladesh, who is also the Vice-President of the Global Leaders Group at AMR, presented a five-point action plan in the dialogue to fight AMR and to deal with it effectively and effectively in danger. In her first proposal, Sheikh Hasina called for the adoption of multi-departmental and integrated action plans on AMR at both the regional and global levels with special focus on low and middle income countries. ‘Dealing with AMR requires good production, laboratory practice and surveillance framework,’ the Prime Minister said in his second proposal. In her third proposal, the Prime Minister emphasized the need to ensure appropriate access to affordable and effective antibiotics through technology transfer and ownership sharing.

In his Fourth and Fifth Proposals, he advocated for sustainable funding for AMR prevention activities through political commitment and partnerships between member countries and for raising public awareness on the fight against it (AMR). Highlighting her government's steps in the fight against AMR, Sheikh Hasina said they have prepared a six-year (2016 to 2022) National Strategic Plan and National Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance Containment-ARC. The Prime Minister noted that laboratory-based AMR surveillance is being conducted regularly for the health of both humans and animals to ensure WHO classification. Similarly, since 2019, we have been providing AMR surveillance data to the WHO Glass platform, ”he said.

The Prime Minister indicated that addressing the challenges of AMR is important for preventing future epidemics. To this end, we need to formulate the 2015 Global Action Plan on AMR, the UN Political Declaration on AMR 2018 and the AMR National Action Plan. Sheikh Hasina, Vice-President of the Global Leaders Group on AMR, added that the Prime Minister of Barbados and she are ready to work with relevant stakeholders to contribute to the fight against AMR.