Funds to Fight Antibiotic Resistance to Double in 2016 U.S. Budget

The Obama administration is budgeting more than $1.2 billion in federal funding to combat antibiotic resistance – nearly double the current budget.

The announcement for the 2016 budget is not expected until next week, but a fact sheet released earlier this week highlighted the issue, calling antibiotic resistance “one of the most pressing public health issues facing the world today.”

According to Food Safety News, the additional $650 million in funding would go to the National Institutes of Health and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to “support the development of new diagnostics and efforts to characterize resistance.”

$280 million would go to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “to support antibiotic stewardship, outbreak surveillance, antibiotic use and resistance monitoring, and research and development related to combating antibiotic resistance,” Food Safety News explained, with another $47 million for the Food and Drug Administration to “support the evaluation of new antibacterial drugs for humans and animals.”

An additional $77 million would go to the USDA to research antibiotic alternatives, with an emphasis on improved management of livestock. The Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense would also receive more than $150 million between the two departments to address issues of antibiotic resistance in health care settings where infections like antibiotic resistant MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) are becoming increasingly common.

“Efforts to improve surveillance capabilities will include increasing the number of CDC’s Emerging Infections Program sites from 10 to 20, enabling the DoD to collect ongoing and enhanced antibiotic use and resistance data, establishing a network of regional laboratories to characterize emerging resistance and identify outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant organisms, and creating an Antibiotic Resistance Isolate Bank,” reports Food Safety News.

With the new budget in tow, the White House anticipates as much as a 60 percent reduction in the number of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae infections, a 50 percent reduction in MRSA infections, a 35 percent decrease in Pseudomonas infections acquired during hospitalization and a 25 percent reduction in salmonella infections.

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Pig receiving injection image via Shutterstock 

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