Question: Have you thought of a vaccine to help stop or reduce AMR

Carys Redman-White answered on 19 Jan 2022:

That’s a really good question! Vaccines are a big part of how we tackle AMR, because if we can reduce the chance of someone catching an infection, there’s less chance we’ll need to treat them with antibiotics (which promotes resistance) and there’s also less chance that they’ll catch a version that’s already resistant to antibiotics.
One example of a disease where vaccination helps us address AMR is tuberculosis (TB), which is treated with a very long course of antibiotics, and there are lots of multi-drug-resistant strains of it. Vaccinating people makes it less likely for them to catch TB, so it’s safer for them, but not catching it also means they aren’t passing it on to other people. Exactly the same principles apply to us treating animals – it’s one of the many reasons we vaccinate pet dogs against leptospirosis (often called “Lepto”).
Unfortunately we can’t make a single vaccine that will stop *all* the resistant bugs in one, because vaccines work by telling our immune system what to look for, and there isn’t one specific marker for AMR that our immune system could recognise. We just have to vaccinate against the microbes that we would expect to cause disease, which come in lots of different types, so scientists are always working on developing new vaccines!