Jeddah conference closes with adoption of global pledges to tackle antimicrobial resistance

Immediately following the adoption of the commitments in the Saudi coastal city, the host country’s Minister of Health Fahad Al-Jalajel said the conference outcome provides “critical building blocks” for member states and international bodies to significantly act against antimicrobial resistance, and that it builds on the Political Declaration on AMR adopted at a High-Level UN General Assembly meeting a few weeks ago in New York.

The commitments highlight the role of the Quadripartite Joint Secretariat on AMR, which is comprised of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the World Organization for Animal Health (WOAH). They also call for the creation of a new ‘biotech bridge’ aimed at boosting research, development and innovation to find solutions to the global threat.

Minister Al-Jalajel announced the establishment of an AMR ‘One Health’ Learning Hub and a regional Antimicrobial Access and Logistics Hub in Saudi Arabia to foster global collaboration and improve access to essential antimicrobials and diagnostics.

Antimicrobial resistance, or AMR happens when germs develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them. It can spread between people, animals, and the environment, and can cause deadly infections. 

Leaving no one behind

Welcoming the adoption of the Jeddah Commitments, Jacqueline Alvarez, head of UNEP’s Chemicals and Health Branch, said the outcome document is an example of successful multilateralism and “the benefits of working jointly among the different sectors”.

She added: “The Jeddah Commitments bring everybody that has a role to play together for action.”

Ms. Alvarez said the document recognizes that countries have different capabilities to address antimicrobial resistance and specifically refers to developing countries and how they can engage. “We cannot leave anyone behind – meaning that we must ensure that everybody can grow together and not widen the gap among countries,” she explained to UN News.

The UNEP official stressed the need to scale up finance, “not only in the traditional way, but also by creating opportunities to develop further research, and create green and sustainable solutions, which would allow everyone to feel that they have opportunities while they are protecting themselves.”

The Jeddah conference and the earlier High-Level General Assembly meeting both focused on the social and economic dimensions of the AMR problem, “which have not been thoroughly discussed yet,” she said. 

The combat continues

Stakeholders were eager to build on the global political momentum and rally behind the fight against AMR. Just as the conference ended, they met in parallel at the Ritz-Carlton in Jeddah for the second plenary assembly of the ARM Multi-Stakeholder Partnership Platform to chart a way forward and turn the fresh commitments into practical reality.

The platform is one of the three governance structures established by the Quadripartite Joint Secretariat on AMR and hosted by FAO. It brings together 250 members “from the very grassroots level to the global level.”

To further understand its purpose, UN News spoke to the Multi-Stakeholder Partnership Platform Coordinator, Nelea Motriuc, who explained that AMR was previously viewed as a technical issue to be discussed among doctors and veterinarians, but “everything changed” with the first General Assembly High-Level Meeting on the global threat in 2016.

“A high-level meeting at the General Assembly can really help build momentum and shine a spotlight on a development issue,” she added.

Ms. Motriuc said the Platform is a unique “multi-sectoral, multidisciplinary, multilevel and multidimensional” mechanism that is “not only talking [about], but doing” the work across the One Health spectrum, with an aim to “to break silos, build bridges, and create an ecosystem of all the actors, dimensions and processes working together.”

This is done through 13, so-called action groups that focus on global, regional, sectoral, and even topic-specific actions and recommendations.

“What is special about these action groups is [the] bottom-up approach in which a multistakeholder community brings their collective knowledge and assess their needs. They tell us the priorities that need to be addressed,” Ms. Motriuc said.

FAO’s technical lead on antimicrobial resistance, Junxia Song, told UN News that most of the recommendations made by one of the working groups had been incorporated into the General Assembly’s Political Declaration. 

In today’s discussions, Ms. Song said participants had focused on how to implement the Jeddah commitments and the political declaration through “very interactive discussions” and sought to come up with concrete solutions and actions at all levels for that purpose.

The accelerating attention around AMR comes just ahead of a week dedicated to raising awareness on this pressing global health and socioeconomic crisis, as World AMR Awareness Week is set to start on Monday, 18 November, under the theme Educate. Advocate. Act now.