Active Food & Agriculture Public Health & Healthcare

Global Antibiotic Policy initiative – GAPi

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

Antibiotics are losing their power, and this project will calculate exactly which policies—and which levels of antibiotic use—offer the best economic and health returns for the world. The problem is stark: antimicrobial resistance already kills hundreds of thousands of people each year, yet no one has systematically weighed the costs and benefits of different intervention strategies across human health, animal farming, and the environment. Current decisions are made in the dark. This project will build the first integrated models that combine data from all three sectors—plus crop agriculture—to estimate global antibiotic exposure and its consequences. If successful, the research will tell governments and international bodies whether to act now, act now while collecting more data, or wait for better evidence before spending billions on new regulations, stewardship programmes, or bans on agricultural antibiotic use. The output is a decision-making tool, not a cure. It will prevent costly, poorly evidenced policies that waste public money and fail to slow resistance—keeping common infections treatable and routine surgeries safe for longer.

View original technical description
Antimicrobial resistance is responsible for significant mortality and economic harm. There is an urgent need to guide decision making around implementation of interventions aimed at achieving sustainable global levels of antibiotic use that ensure continued successful treatment of common infections. The overall aim of this project is to evaluate which decisions around antibiotic exposure targets and intervention implementation are optimal given the available data. We will pilot new methods that combine information from multiple sources to estimate antibiotic exposure across the Quadripartite sectors (WS1), develop the model structures needed to capture relevant health- economic consequences of intervention implementation (WS2), synthesise current evidence about parameters required to populate these models (WS3), and evaluate which exposure targets, as well as implementation of interventions aimed at reducing AMR burden, are associated with the largest net economic benefits (WS4). Through supplementing cost-effectiveness with macro-economic and value of information techniques the output will help to assess whether interventions should be i) implemented now, ii) implemented now with the requirement of further data collection and decision re-evaluation, or iii) delayed until further research has been performed to reduce uncertainty around influential parameters, reducing the probability of implementing poorly evidenced and/or cost-ineffective policies.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Aislinn Cook (EPMC Awardee)Anthony McDonnell (EPMC Awardee)Ben Cooper (EPMC Awardee)David Smith (EPMC Awardee)Koen Pouwels (EPMC Awardee)Mike Sharland (EPMC Awardee)Ramanan Laximinarayan (EPMC Awardee)Yot Teerawattananon (EPMC Awardee)

Related Research

Grants with similar aims, by meaning.

Working Group and Research Project on Antimicrobial Resistance
The Global Governance of Antimicrobial Resistance: An Empirical Analysis of Participation and Effectiveness
Antibiotic stewardship in agricultural communities in Africa and Asia: A unified One Health strategy to optimise antibiotic use in animals and humans
Rethinking How to Understand the Burden of Antibiotic Resistant Bacteria: establishing best-practice through comparative analyses
Antimicrobial Resistance, Prescribing, and Consumption Data to Inform Country Antibiotic Guidance and Local Action – the ADILA project.

Original classification

Discretionary Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.