The National Academies will convene an expert committee to examine and quantify the long-term medical and economic impacts of increasing antimicrobial resistance in the United States. The study shall examine progress made on the U.S. National Strategy and Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria, including domestic and international strategies employed by NIH, CDC, FDA, ASPR, USDA, and USAID.

Opportunities to add to the current body of knowledge include:

• advising on an effective strategy to scale up global detection of resistant infections and infection prevention and control efforts – especially outside of the U.S. and Europe;

• helping to assess and quantify the risk to human health from environmental sources and reservoirs of antibiotic resistant pathogens and genes;

• assessing any methodologies for evaluating how interventions in agriculture impact public health and how to improve them;

• assessing any methodologies for evaluating the impacts of interventions in agricultural settings on animal health and welfare and how to improve them;

• assessing the impact of new incentives for antibiotic development (BARDA’s project Bioshield, 2019 CMS IPPS) on the health of the antibiotic pipeline;

• exploring methodological innovations to improve projections of the burden of AMR and its economic impacts, with an eye toward informing the development of incentives for antimicrobial products;

• exploring ways to develop, benchmark, and track rigorous quantitative measures of the impact of various strategies to mitigate AMR, with a focus on relevant, timely, and actionable measures;

• assessing the need for and advise on key diseases and antibiotics for which animal-specific antimicrobial susceptibility testing breakpoints are needed; and

• assessing the need for and explore how to incentivize and promote cooperative relationships between industry and professional societies to prioritize test development of new diagnostics for use in veterinary settings, especially animal-side diagnostics that allow precise selection of antibiotics.