#16 How drug safety can help fight resistant bugs – Jean Marie Vianney Habarugira & Albert Figueras

Managing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) will require innovative solutions from many different disciplines. Could pharmacovigilance be one of them? Jean Marie Vianney Habarugira and Albert Figueras, who have been investigating how drug safety tools could help track AMR, think it’s time the two communities joined forces for good.

Tune in to find out:

• How to code adverse drug reactions for optimal AMR surveillance
• How to use pharmacovigilance networks to track resistant pathogens and falsified antimicrobials
• Why collaborating with AMR specialists will benefit the drug safety community

Want to know more?

• In their study, Jean Marie and Albert shortlisted 17 MedDRA codes used to report AMR-related adverse drug reactions in a global and a national pharmacovigilance database.
• Pharmacovigilance tools could be especially useful in estimating the burden of AMR in low-resource communities that lack diagnostic lab capacity.
• Jean Marie’s research was inspired by this article in Uppsala Reports, which defined antimicrobial resistance as an overlooked adverse event.
• Since 2015, the World Health Organization’s GLASS (Global Antimicrobial Resistance and Use Surveillance System) has been used to collect, analyse, and share AMR data around the world.

Interested in AMR from a social perspective? Then don’t miss this Drug Safety Matters episode on behaviour change communication.

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