Dr Abdullah Algwizani, CEO of the Public Health Authority of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia;
Dr Young mee Jee, Commissioner of the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency;
Professor Dame Sally Davies, UK Special Envoy on AMR;
Professor Ramanan Laxminarayan, President of the One Health Trust;
Vanessa Carter, Chair of the WHO Taskforce of AMR Survivors;
Dr Audrey Wong, Chair of the Quadripartite Working Group on Youth Engagement for AMR;
Our moderator, Dr Peter Piot;
Excellencies, dear colleagues and friends,
Dear colleagues, thank you for joining us today.
I would like to thank Her Excellency Prime Minister Mia Mottley for her outstanding advocacy and leadership as Chair of the Global Leaders Group on AMR. We will hear from her shortly through a video message.
Antimicrobial resistance is a growing and urgent crisis, and is already a leading cause of death globally. In 2019, 1.3 million deaths resulted directly from bacterial AMR – more than two every minute, on average.
AMR threatens to unwind a century of medical progress, and also threatens animal health, global food production, food security, and the environment.
The United Nations high-level meeting in September is an important opportunity for global leaders to make measurable commitments towards stopping AMR.
This is followed by the Ministerial Conference on AMR in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in November, where those commitments can be translated into concrete action.
Yesterday, the World Health Assembly approved a resolution on how to accelerate national and global responses to AMR, based on a One Health approach.
WHO is committed to supporting countries to implement the resolution, together with our partners, including the Quadripartite organizations – the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Environment Programme and the World Organisation for Animal Health.
Thank you all for your commitment to this urgent global health threat, to protecting the medicines that protect us, and to ensuring all those who need them can access them.
I thank you.