CIDRZ joins global partners to combat antibiotic overuse and antimicrobial resistance

The Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ) has joined forces with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM), along with partners in Uganda and Malawi, to spearhead research aimed at combating the growing global threat of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

AMR is an urgent global health problem, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. Overuse and misuse of antibiotics are key drivers, making it essential to ensure that patients with life-threatening illnesses receive appropriate medication while reducing unnecessary prescriptions. This challenge is compounded by the lack of affordable, accurate, and rapid diagnostic tools to guide treatment, and limited surveillance systems to track resistance.

Through the Optimizing Antibiotic Usage to Mitigate AMR (Opt-AMR) project, healthcare professionals, and Ministries of Health in Uganda, Malawi, and Zambia, researchers from Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, and a range of academic partners in all three countries will aim to create new strategies to optimise antibiotic use and reduce AMR.

The project will focus on children under five with fevers, a common condition in sub-Saharan Africa often treated with broad-spectrum antibiotics when malaria tests are negative, increasing the risk of resistance.

The initiative will introduce a new AMR surveillance system to monitor resistance to antibiotics prescribed for such cases. Sampling across multiple healthcare facilities, researchers will assess prevalence and severity of resistance, explore the relationship between prescribing practices and community antibiotic use, and identify antibiotics less prone to resistance.

Working in equitable partnership with local communities, healthcare professionals and policymakers, these findings will help to shape effective strategies to improve quality-of-care and antibiotic use in healthcare facilities and local communities.

Opt-AMR is a £3m project, funded by National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), led by LSTM and managed by iiCON in collaboration with Makerere University in Uganda, the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Programme, Doctors with Africa CUAMM and CIDRZ.

Professor Joseph Valadez, Professor of Global Health and co-lead on Opt-AMR, said: “This project marks a turning point for empowering district management teams and local communities to address the causes of AMR, and to obtain needed surveillance information to inform their strategies.”

Dr Anjali Sharma, Senior Research Technical Advisor at CIDRZ and co-lead on Opt-AMR, said: “This is an exciting project that harnesses expertise from three countries and employs localised approaches to achieve a global impact.”