BURDEN of Resistance and Disease in European Nations

The emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance has become a major public health threat in Europe. The number of infections caused by resistant pathogens continues to increase in the European Union (EU) and worldwide. These infections cause suffering, incapacity and death, and impose an enormous financial burden on both healthcare systems and on society in general, because of direct costs due to prolongation of illness and treatment in hospital, indirect costs due to loss of productivity, and societal costs due to morbidity and mortality. This is likely to lead to already-scarce healthcare resources being diverted to infection control efforts, and will have long-term implications due to loss of confidence in the medical profession and in the public healthcare delivery system provided or regulated by governments.

The aim of this project is to generate the appropriate awareness and understanding of the societal dimension among policy-makers and communities at large to enable action upon these issues by providing valid and comparable information on the burden of disease and the costs attributable to infections caused by antimicrobial resistant pathogens in member states and accession countries of the European Union.
Both quantitative information and individual case histories will provide a realistic and complementary picture of the scope of AMR in Europe.

BURDEN is coordinated by the Institute of Environmental Medicine and Hospital Epidemiology, University Medical Centre Freiburg. For information on BURDEN please us.

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