The Ministry of Health has appealed to Ugandan scientists to find local solutions to the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which is the ability of infectious agents to resist drugs meant to kill them. About 30,000 annual deaths in Uganda are linked to AMR, according to government scientists.
Dr Diana Atwine, the Permanent Secretary at the Ministry, made the appeal on Friday while launching the National Integrated Interoperable Digital Data Capture and Sharing Platform. The AI-enabled platform is meant to enhance detection and monitoring of AMR to inform decisions and improve effectiveness of interventions.
‘We are looking at a platform that brings all the information on AMR from all areas, being governed by one health. By one health, we refer to AMR in humans, animals like agriculture, in wildlife and in environment,’ she said.
‘So, we are trying to get all this information and be able to be stored in one place at the Ministry of Health so that whoever is looking for information regarding AMR can easily access this. In future, we are going to have the dashboards that will be able to have all landscape of AMR in the country under one health,’ she added.
Dr Atwine appealed to scientists to develop medicines or formulations that can replace drugs that are no longer working. She also urged the public to stop taking antibiotics without prescription. ‘We are encouraging the scientists in the country, the academia, to study more, for example, we have a lot of herbal medicines in this country, but they haven’t been fully harnessed to get the molecules in there that can actually turn into therapeutics and used to treat,’ she said.
The lead developer of the launched platform is Josephine Nabukenya, a professor of Health Informatics and Information Systems at Makerere University’s School of Computing and Informatics Technology.
‘The challenge currently is, there is a lot of data on AMR in animals, humans, wildlife and environment. Each of those sectors, picks their own data. And yet, when it comes to AMR, it is a challenge that cuts across, so the different sectors need to support each other,’ she observed.
Prof Nabukenya said antibiotics used in animals are similar to those used in humans, making a coordinated approach critical.
‘When you’re treating an animal, you use the same antibiotic that will treat a human. And the same would be spread in water and environment,’ she said.
‘So it is only important that all these sectors under what we refer to as the one Health approach come together and solve their data challenges as one group,’ she added.