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Project

Antibiotic Resistance Project

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Antibiotic Resistance Project
Antibiotics are fundamental to modern medicine, essential for treating everything from routine skin infections to strep throat, and for protecting vulnerable patients receiving chemotherapy or being treated in intensive care units. 

Although antibiotic resistance is not a new problem, its scope now constitutes a major threat to human health. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans contract more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections every year—and at least 35,000 die.

Medical and public health experts agree that addressing antibiotic resistance requires measures that will ensure both the prudent use of existing drugs and a suite of economic incentives to spur urgently needed antibiotic innovation.

Project Goals

Over the years, Pew has addressed a wide range of challenges in the antibiotic resistance problem—from reducing the need for antibiotic use in food animals and overcoming scientific barriers to antibiotic innovation to improving the collection and reporting of antibiotic use data in all settings. Today, the antibiotic resistance project is focused on advancing policies that would:

  • Spur the creation of new antibiotics by removing the economic obstacles that impede antibiotic discovery and development. 
  • Establish stewardship programs to ensure that antibiotics are prescribed  appropriately in human health care settings. 
Article

True Stories of Antibiotic Resistance

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Article

Resistant infections affect people from all walks of life— –young and old, healthy and chronically ill. These illnesses often start with something seemingly benign, like a simple cut or a routine medical procedure. 

Getty Images
Getty Images

Economic Incentives Needed to Fix the Broken Antibiotic Market

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Antibiotic resistance, a critical public health and national security threat, requires a robust arsenal of novel drugs that bacteria won’t readily outsmart.

Report

Antibiotic Use in Outpatient Settings

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Report

Antibiotic use in outpatient health care settings, such as primary care offices and emergency rooms, represents the majority of dollars spent on antibiotics for human health care in the United States. Beginning in 2015, The Pew Charitable Trusts convened a panel of experts, including representatives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health and medical experts to analyze current outpatient antibiotic prescribing habits in the United States, determine targets for reducing inappropriate prescribing, and identify steps needed to reach these targets.

Person at hospital window
Person at hospital window
Issue Brief

Efforts Fighting the Coronavirus Overusing Antibiotics?

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Issue Brief

For years, leading public health and national security experts have sounded the alarm about the growing threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The more antibiotics are used, the faster that bacteria evolve to resist them, giving rise to so-called “superbugs”—bacteria that are extremely difficult or impossible to treat with existing drugs.

Our Work

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5 Facts About Antibiotic Resistance