“WHO creates crucial list of pathogens”

“Evelina Tacconelli and colleagues, and the WHO Pathogens Priority List Working Group describe how WHO created a priority list of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to support research into and development of effective drugs. The authors used a multicriteria decision analysis method to prioritise antibiotic-resistant bacteria: 20 bacterial species with 25 patterns of acquired resistance and ten criteria to assess priority were used to generate the list.

The ten criteria to assess priority include: mortality, health-care burden, community burden, prevalence of resistance, 10-year trend of resistance, transmissibility, preventability in the community setting, preventability in the health-care setting, treatability, and pipeline. The authors stratified the priority list into three tiers (critical, high, and medium priority), using the 33rd percentile of the bacterium’s total scores as the cutoff.

The authors claim that future development strategies should focus on antibiotics that are active against multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and Gram-negative bacteria. The global strategy should include antibiotic-resistant bacteria responsible for community-acquired infections such as Salmonella spp, Campylobacter spp, N gonorrhoeae, and H pylori.”

Source: The Lancet Infectious Diseases