Reacción a "WHO estimates impact of vaccines in reducing deaths from antimicrobial resistance"

This WHO report on the impact of vaccines on the reduction of antimicrobial resistance highlights several important key points.

First, the crucial role of vaccines in preventing infections. By preventing primary infections, vaccines reduce the need for antimicrobial treatment, which reduces the selective pressure on resistance development. It is estimated that current vaccines can reduce daily antibiotic use by 142 million daily doses each year, and vaccines in development could reduce it by as much as 1.9 billion. This is critical in order to achieve less exposure to antibiotics and therefore less selection of resistant bacteria.

The report emphasises the need to integrate these antibiotic use reduction metrics into clinical trials of new vaccines. This is key to ensuring that new vaccines are not only evaluated for their efficacy and immunogenicity, but also for their impact on reducing antimicrobial resistance. It is also recommended that global immunisation programmes explicitly include the reduction of antimicrobial resistance as one of their objectives, reinforcing the importance of vaccines as a key public health strategy.

Vaccines represent a powerful tool both for disease prevention and for mitigating one of the greatest public health challenges of the 21st century, antimicrobial resistance. It is the so-called ‘silent pandemic’ of this century, as it does not have the immediate visibility of a viral pandemic such as covid-19 but is causing an increasing number of deaths and complications worldwide. According to WHO's own data, antimicrobial resistance caused five million deaths worldwide in 2019 and this figure is expected to rise dramatically in the coming decades if urgent action is not taken.