6 days ago
Labour's decision to close the Fleming Fund is a false economy that puts our national security at risk
Health emergencies rarely respect borders or budgets. As I write, the world is facing an antibiotic emergency, with bacteria rapidly evolving resistance to the treatments we depend on to counter infectious diseases.
Without effective antibiotic treatments, global health and the global economy are defenceless against the likes of pneumonia and sepsis. Antibiotics are the infrastructure of modern medicine, making chemotherapy, caesarean sections and hip replacements
possible.
More than 1.1million people die across the world every year because of antibiotic resistance, including 35,000 in the UK alone. These trends are increasing and inter-generational, with deaths in children tripling in the last three years.
For the last decade, the UK has been at the forefront of global efforts to tackle the wider threat posed by antimicrobial resistance (AMR). While antibiotic resistance poses the single biggest threat to modern medicine, AMR points to a serious problem for all types of antimicrobial agents – antifungals, antivirals, and antiparasitics – threatening to reverse all the significant gains we've made against HIV, malaria, and tuberculosis.
The UK's Fleming Fund has been a bulwark against such threats: building laboratory capacity in 25 low- and-middle-countries to detect emerging AMR outbreaks, allowing for proactive, data-driven responses before they escalate into global crises. Among many other things, the Fleming Fund has tripled the genomic sequencing capacity across the entire African continent – which even pivoted to detect Covid-19 variants.
The UK government's decision to shut down the Fleming Fund is a false economy and directly puts our national security at risk. It will cost lives, as well as precious GDP that could be spent on frontline NHS services.
If we are to learn any lessons at all from Covid-19, it should be that we cannot afford to cut corners when it comes to preventing and preparing for inevitable pathogenic threats.
Bold investment to protect against AMR
Decisions made today will directly impact our ability to counter and contain AMR pandemics in the very near future.
When I was Chancellor in 2023, the Treasury recognised the economic health ramifications of AMR, and the UK government commissioned economic studies to better understand the risks and opportunities.
The Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation found that if AMR resistance accelerates in line with poorer-performing countries, the world faces an additional seven million deaths globally by 2050. The Center for Global Development then estimated that economically, this would wipe $1.7 trillion annually off global GDP by 2050 and it will cost $175 billion extra a year for health systems to treat people.
Country-level estimates released recently estimate that the British economy would be $59 billion smaller in this scenario and the UK would spend an additional $2.8 billion a year treating superbugs. $296 billion and $188 billion would be wiped off the US and EU economies respectively.
In contrast, this research shows that there would be large economic benefits to the UK and elsewhere if we invest in improving the treatment of infections.
With the UK economy facing significant challenges and the NHS workforce facing rising pressures, now is the time to act boldly and invest proactively to protect against AMR. Whilst the UK alone cannot solve AMR, the UK can and should leverage its world-leading technical expertise and diplomatic leadership through the Fleming Fund, its Special Envoy on AMR, Dame Sally Davies, and other global investments in AMR.
Even in a world where only 0.3 per cent of gross national income (GNI) is earmarked for international aid funding, there must be a budget line for AMR. If we are to drive economic growth and build resilience against health threats at home and abroad, we need decisive action with investments that put health security first.
With an evolved Fleming Fund, we can mitigate against the worst effects of AMR by supporting research and development of new antibiotics, increasing access to treatments in countries where lack of access accelerates resistance, embedding large-scale education and training programmes to ensure the sustainable and responsible use of existing antibiotics, and harnessing AI for diagnostic tests and surveillance for the UK and the countries most severely impacted by AMR.
A world without the Fleming Fund puts even greater pressure on UK government and the life sciences sector to find new ways to prepare for the pandemics we already detect and those we are yet to detect, to safeguard UK health and economic security. Now is the time for the government to step up.
