Giving Compass' Take:

• Samantha Vanderslott describes how new vaccines could reduce antibiotic dependence and the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance. 

• What vaccines have the greatest potential for reducing antibiotic dependence? How can funders identify opportunities to make an impact? 

• Learn how to find and fund scientific research


Along with vaccines, antibiotics often top lists of the most important medical discoveries, with both interventions having a tremendous impact on illness and deaths from communicable diseases.

However, the usefulness of antibiotics to medicine is under threat.

One means of slowing antimicrobial resistance is by combating misuse and overuse as proposed by the campaigns ‘Keep Antibiotics Working’ and 'Seek advice from a qualified healthcare professional before taking antibiotics'. Other measures include encouraging better hygiene and infection control, surveillance of drug resistance, and reducing the overuse of antibiotics for livestock in agriculture (we at OWID looked at this issue in last week's post).

Another option is to foster scientific discovery, in order to produce new antibiotics or diagnostics to analyze whether antibiotics are indeed needed. New vaccines are not often connected with solutions for antimicrobial resistance. But vaccine resistance compared with antimicrobial resistance is rare. With a vaccination there is less time for the pathogen to evolve as the body is ready to fight off the infection and also because vaccines target many structures of the pathogen, while antimicrobial drugs target one specific part of the pathogen so that just one mutation can result in resistance. Vaccines therefore present opportunities to reduce our dependence on antibiotics.

Read the full article about vaccines and antibiotic dependence by Samantha Vanderslott at Our World in Data.