Extending the Cure Helps CDC Kick-Off Its ‘Get Smart for Healthcare’ Campaign

To bring attention to the growing global problem of antibiotic resistance, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) observed its Get Smart About Antibiotics Week Nov. 15-21. This national campaign highlighted the coordinated efforts of the agency, states, non-profit partners, and for-profit partners to educate the public about antibiotic resistance and the importance of appropriate antibiotic use in both community and health care settings.

Extending the Cure, a Pioneer -sponsored project that examines policy solutions for antibiotic resistance, collaborated with the CDC and other partners as part of this awareness campaign.  Get Smart About Antibiotics Week helped launch CDC’s Get Smart for Healthcare program, which urges health care providers to curb the unnecessary use of antibiotics, a practice that significantly contributes to antibiotic resistance.

A guest blog post about the campaign ran Wednesday in The Health Care Blog. In it, co-authors Arjun Srinivasan, Medical Director for CDC’s “Get Smart for Healthcare” campaign, and Ramanan Laxminarayan, Director of Extending the Cure called on hospitals, healthcare facilities, and pharmaceutical companies to engage in better stewardship of these drugs.

An op-ed also ran in The Boston Globe this week, with its authors proposing an innovative solution to one aspect of the problem: compensation to the developers of new antibiotics should be connected to avoiding the overuse and overselling of these drugs. Authors Aaron Kesselheim of Harvard Medical School and Kevin Outterson of Boston University, both of whom have been studying this topic with support from the RWJF Public Health Law Research program, argued this will “preserve the power of antibiotics so that these drugs will still work in the future.” They suggest pricing new antibiotics at a higher level that better reflects their value and implementing incentive-based policies that ensure that antibiotics are not oversold.

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