Interestingly, if you speak to the people leading the global policy response on AMR the main theme that comes out is “we should be prioritising actions more effectively”*. That was one of the key findings of speaking to 150+ leaders in the field for a report (I was involved in most of these interviews; opinion is theirs, not mine independently). This holds true across sectors, and across elements of the response. I think EA could contribute a lot here, but in my experience EA has made a (sometimes conscious, sometimes implicit) choice to deprioritise AMR as a cause (with the exception of the PAR Foundation’s great work). If anyone is interested in working on AMR in an EA context, would love to chat.
*This is a bit of a simplification of “we have a spaghetti bowl of complex, interlinked biomedical and policy challenges and all contribute and so we try and solve all of them at the same time but we have limited ressources; and this is actually a second-order problem to the first-order problem of ‘we don’t have good estimates on which aspect of the response we should prioritise, e.g. does use in factory farms drive 5% or 30% of the resistance burden’”. But the core takeaway is prioritisation is needed in a resource-constrained environment while you’re on a train that is heading off a cliff, fast.
Interestingly, if you speak to the people leading the global policy response on AMR the main theme that comes out is “we should be prioritising actions more effectively”*. That was one of the key findings of speaking to 150+ leaders in the field for a report (I was involved in most of these interviews; opinion is theirs, not mine independently). This holds true across sectors, and across elements of the response. I think EA could contribute a lot here, but in my experience EA has made a (sometimes conscious, sometimes implicit) choice to deprioritise AMR as a cause (with the exception of the PAR Foundation’s great work). If anyone is interested in working on AMR in an EA context, would love to chat.
*This is a bit of a simplification of “we have a spaghetti bowl of complex, interlinked biomedical and policy challenges and all contribute and so we try and solve all of them at the same time but we have limited ressources; and this is actually a second-order problem to the first-order problem of ‘we don’t have good estimates on which aspect of the response we should prioritise, e.g. does use in factory farms drive 5% or 30% of the resistance burden’”. But the core takeaway is prioritisation is needed in a resource-constrained environment while you’re on a train that is heading off a cliff, fast.