Antibiotic resistance: more companies are withdrawing sales reps or incentives in order to limit use, finds report

Pharmaceutical companies are tackling the overselling of antimicrobials by withdrawing their sales agents or removing the incentives for sale representatives to oversell antibiotics or antifungals, according to 2020 Antimicrobial Resistance Benchmark report.1

The report, which looked at the progress that companies have made since 2018, found that while there has been some improvement, change is not happening at the scale needed to radically impact the threat from drug resistance.

The Access to Medicine Foundation—an independent non-profit organisation—launched the report at the World Economic Forum 2020, and called on governments and the pharmaceutical industry to take the situation seriously and work together to solve it.

“We’re not asking for a scientific miracle here, we are asking for human intervention,” the foundation’s executive director Jayasree Iyer told The BMJ.

The findings show that 10 companies have now …