Dar es Salaam, Dec. 1 -- ANTIMICROBIAL resistance (AMR) is no longer a distant or theoretical threat. Across the region, we now regularly witness lives disrupted or lost because infections no longer respond to medicines that once worked.

A woman loses her husband to a previously treatable infection, a newborn dies because first-line antibiotics fail, a farmer watches livestock weaken despite treatment and clinicians confront impossible decisions when diagnostics are limited and last-resort drugs are inaccessible or ineffective.

These are the lived realities of AMR—a crisis that has quietly grown into one of the most serious public health, economic and development challenges of our time. AMR develops when microorganisms such as bac...