00:00 Q&A World Health Organisation

00:05 What is antimicrobial resistance – AMR? And how dangerous is it?

00:07 Dr Marie-Paule Kieny - World Health Organization Assistant Director-General for Health Systems and Innovation: Many diseases that we have are caused by microbes, so microbes, but can be viruses, fungi and bacteria, and nowadays we have quite good medicine to treat them.

00:20 Dr Marie-Paule Kieny: For example, in certain cases of pneumonia you can use antibiotics and than this treats very well the patient.

00:30 Dr Marie-Paule Kieny: But what is happening is that as we are using these antibiotics with antimicrobials, the microbes adapt, and first we need a little bit more of it and finally they escape completely and they become what we call resistant.

00:44 Dr Keiji Fukuda - Special Representative of the World Health Organization for Antimicrobial Resistance: This is a problem which has been developing over decades, it's going to endanger our ability to take care of people in health systems, it's going to endanger our ability to sustain our food supply and it's going to really endanger our ability to continue development in the world, taken together this is a major social challenge.

01:08 What can we do to fight this threat?

01:11 Dr Marie-Paule Kieny: The public has clearly an important role to do. One is not to request a health worker or a doctor to give them antibiotics, without any evidence that there is a need for antibiotics.

01:23 Dr Marie-Paule Kieny: If you come to a practitioner and you say “I have a runny nose, give me antibiotics”, well first the health practitioner or doctors who said, “Well no you don't need antibiotics” because most of the time it will be a virus and not a bacterium.

01:37 Dr Marie-Paule Kieny: So the public shouldn’t insist on getting antibiotics, so this is about getting it.

01:43 Dr Marie-Paule Kieny: So when you have got antibiotics, what you should do is finish as much of the tablets that have been prescribed by the doctor, not stop before, not continue after.

01:54 Dr Marie-Paule Kieny: If you have left over tablets you should not give it to somebody else because this is another disease and what you have may not be adapted.

02:04 Dr Marie-Paule Kieny: And then you have hygiene measures, you should wash your hands so that you don't infect yourself or you infect others, you should practice safer sex, you should try to eat proper food without infection.

02:18 Dr Marie-Paule Kieny: So there is a lot that the public can do to reduce the spread and the threat actually of antimicrobial resistance on public health.

02:27 Dr Keiji Fukuda: For most people, they've never heard of antimicrobial resistance or AMR and so they'll be confused as to why are we even addressing it.

02:35 Dr Keiji Fukuda: So I think that until we get people understanding that this is a major issue and it's a major issue which they have some role to play, but also that it will possibly harm them on a day to day basis, I think it's going to be difficult to deal with really turning it backwards, and so it's probably the most fundamental issue right now.

02:59 World Health Organisation. © WHO 2016