South Sudan's English Daily Newspaper
"We Dare where others fear"
By Okech Francis
Political will and a ramp up in investment are key to the fight on antimicrobial resistance (AMR), one of the greatest public health security threat in South Sudan as well as globally, the Minister of Health, Yolanda Awel Deng said.
Speaking at the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly this week, Awel noted that antimicrobial resistance is a serious threat to effective prevention and treatment of infections.
“As antibiotics and other antimicrobials are becoming ineffective, treatment options are increasingly becoming limited, expensive, or unavailable” while “resistance is spreading at an alarming rate,” she said.
Limited data on the burden of AMR in South Sudan requires urgent action to strengthen the knowledge and evidence based through surveillance and research and in line with that, the country has developed a national action plan for tackling antimicrobial resistance and strengthening antibiotic stewardship in line with global scientific standards by establishing one health lab network and inter-linking the public health laboratory, to other hospital laboratories, according to the minister.
The government will also implement a pilot project on the Pathogen Surveillance in Human, Agriculture, Food, animal, and Environment program that will use the Antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) and latest DNA-sequencing technology to improve the detection and tracking of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), Awel said.
“The National one health laboratory network will be a platform to support the establishment of integrated collaboration system between human and animal health laboratory that provides a cost-effective service by consolidating equipment, personnel and partners’ support,” she said, adding that “more investment is needed as well as political will” from various government sectors to implement this.
“South Sudan commits to join the world in the fight against the threat posed by the Emergence and spread of Antimicrobial Resistance,” She said. “I believe together we contain the threat of AMR and protect the world from the world from the consequences of antimicrobial resistance.”
