Health-EU Newsletter 189 - Focus

EU Health Award 2016 helps NGOs continue the fight against Antimicrobial Resistance

This year's award recognised European NGOs working to reduce the threat to human health from antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Three winners - selected from 26 candidates – were announced on 6 February 2017 at the Horizon Prize and EU Health Award for NGOs joint ceremony in Leuven, Belgium, where they spoke with the Health-EU newsletter. Each was asked about the main focus of their work and the projected impact of winning the prize.

1st Prize winner, BEUC/The European Consumer Organisation - Antibiotic resistance campaign “From Farm to you”. Monique Goyens, Director General of BEUC, spoke to the Health-EU newsletter.

We represent 43 independent national consumer organisations from 31 European countries, acting as their umbrella group in Brussels and working to defend the interests of all European consumers. With our members, we work to raise awareness around antimicrobial resistance. Public health authorities now warn consumers against immediately taking antibiotics as soon as they fall ill. BEUC believes this attitude should be expanded to farming practices too, as antibiotics are often overused or misused in livestock. Among our many actions, BEUC has developed an infograph which illustrates how bacteria can become antibiotic-resistant and spread from farms to humans through the environment (See link in Focus News).

The €20,000 prize is a great honour for us and will help us continue our vital work in helping to eradicate one of the biggest threats to human health we have faced in modern times. One of our biggest jobs is to change livestock practices and to raise awareness among consumers but also among policy makers, who have a crucial role to play in ensuring EU laws no longer permit the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in farm animals.

2nd Prize winner, Alliance to Save our Antibiotics – Compassion in World Farming – Soil Association – Sustain. Cóilín Nunan, Scientific Advisor to the Alliance, spoke about the initiative.

The Alliance to Save our Antibiotics is a coalition of 60+ EU-wide organisations, spanning health, medical, environmental, farming and animal welfare sectors. We are calling for a ban to the routine preventative use of antibiotics in groups of healthy animals in the UK and the EU and for dramatic reductions to farm use of the ‘Critically Important’ antibiotics.

Crucially, The Alliance is campaigning for the adoption of farming practices that prioritise animal health and welfare, reducing the need for antibiotics in the first place.

Gaining this recognition is such an achievement, especially when there were so many excellent contenders for this honour. The overuse of antibiotics in farming threatens to reverse decades of medical advances. Winning this prize will help us to raise awareness of this crucial issue and to continue our important work campaigning for an EU-wide strategy to effectively reduce the overuse of antibiotics in farming before it is too late.

3rd Prize winner was the World Alliance Against Antibiotic Resistance WAAAR - Acting to Preserve Antibiotics Initiative. WAAAR founder and president Dr Jean Carlet spoke to the Health-EU newsletter.

WAAAR is working hard to get the 'concept of antibiotics' listed as part of our intangible cultural heritage as defined by UNESCO.

Antibiotics are the most important pillar of the post-WWII modern health system – it's horrific to imagine a world where they were ineffective - and yet we are depleting this precious resource through overuse or misuse in both humans and in animals.

A vital part of our action plan is to raise awareness: being honoured by the European Commission gives us greater visibility and helps us to reach more people. We hope to convince authorities to take appropriate action to limit the spread of multi-drug resistant pathogens and we do fight hard, but we're fighting a major threat in the hopes of saving lives.

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