Antimicrobial drug resistance threat: our duty towards future generations

Since their availability in the 1940s, antimicrobial drugs have been a miracle. For example, penicillin reduced death rates among patients with pneumonia and bacteraemia from approximately 90% to 10%. Seventy years later, however, increasing levels of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) on all continents is endangering the prevention and treatment of infections ranging from the common to the life-threatening ones which disproportionately affect the poor, such as tuberculosis, malaria and HIV.