The four global health agencies known collectively as the Quadripartite yesterday released a research agenda to help prevent and mitigate antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in humans, animals, agriculture, and the environment.
The One Health Priority Research Agenda for AMR contains 10 priority research areas across five themes: transmission, integrated surveillance, interventions, behavioral insights and change, and economics and policy. The agencies say the research areas were selected because they have "the greatest potential for strengthening research capacity and being the most actionable, inclusive, and impactful in the field of One Health AMR."
The priority research areas include identifying the sources and drivers of AMR between One Health sectors and which infection prevention and control practices affect the development and circulation of resistant pathogens; identifying the optimum strategies and minimum standards for establishing and maintaining integrated AMR surveillance; and identifying ways to translate and scale up the most effective One Health interventions for AMR control in settings with varying resources.
Additional priorities
Other priorities include identifying, characterizing, and assessing structural barriers to AMR-related behaviors; determining the role that communication strategies can play in promoting One Health AMR risk-reducing behaviors; and identifying the optimal financial resource strategy that will sustain support for One Health AMR interventions, particularly in low-resource countries.
The One Health research agenda comes on the heels of the World Health Organization's (WHO's) release last week of a global research agenda for addressing AMR in human health. That agenda laid out 40 research priorities across five themes.
The Quadripartite comprises the WHO, the United Nations (UN) Food & Agricultural Organization, the UN Environment Program, and the World Organization for Animal Health.