Antibiotic Resistance Project

Antibiotics are fundamental to modern medicine, essential for treating everything from routine skin infections to strep throat—and for protecting vulnerable patients receiving chemotherapy or being treated in intensive care units. 

Although antibiotic resistance is not a new problem, its scope now constitutes a major threat to human health. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2019 Antibiotic Resistance Threats Report, Americans contract more than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections every year—and at least 35,000 die.

Medical and public health experts agree that addressing antibiotic resistance requires measures that will ensure both the prudent use of existing drugs and a suite of economic incentives to spur urgently needed antibiotic innovation.

Project goals

For more than a decade, Pew addressed a wide range of aspects of the antibiotic resistance problem—including reducing the need for antibiotic use in food animals, overcoming barriers to antibiotic innovation, establishing stewardship programs that support the appropriate prescribing of antibiotics, and improving the collection and reporting of antibiotic use data in all settings.