Antimicrobial resistance in Italy costs around 800 million euros in acute hospitalizations resulting from infections every year.
It also causes economic damage of around 200 million euros in terms of lost patient productivity.
These are some of the data contained in the Roadmap for Antimicrobial Resistance, released today by Cittadinanzattiva.
The document analyzes current knowledge on antimicrobial resistance and presents 10 different strategies that can be adopted as priorities to combat it.
They range from educating citizens on the conscious use of antibiotics to training health professionals;
from the development of new antibiotics to monitoring resistance;
from the use of rapid diagnostic tests to the promotion of research from a One Health perspective.
Globally, infections with resistant bacteria cause approximately 1.5 million deaths per year;
the number rises to almost 5 million if indirect deaths are also considered.
Italy is among the most affected countries: every year there are between 10 and 15,000 hospital deaths due to infections from multi-resistant bacteria.
"The phenomenon of antimicrobial resistance represents an emergency for public health not only for the epidemiological, economic and social impact that derives from it, but also because the risk determined by the rapid loss of efficacy by a number of increasingly high number of antibiotics and the reduced development of new antibiotic molecules over the last decade", declares Valeria Fava, head of health policy coordination at Cittadinanzattiva.
"This is why it is a priority to identify a shared and unitary strategy to combat it."
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