In a first, the experts looked at the consequences of antibiotic treatment failure – higher death rates, lost earnings, more expensive diagnostics, costs to care providers and health systems – to calculate in USD the cost of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) for five types of antibiotic drugs widely used in the USA, a high-income country (HIC), and in Thailand, a lower-middle income country (LMIC).
These estimates will help us to better understand the true costs of AMR associated with antibiotic consumption. They provide policy makers and health carers with data they can use to decide on how best to deploy their limited resources to fight drug-resistant infections,” says first author, Poojan Shrestha, researcher at the IDDO.