The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has reviewed federal efforts to address antibiotic resistance.
Bacterial infections have become more difficult, and sometimes impossible, to treat due to antibiotic resistance, which occurs when bacteria develop the ability to defeat the available drugs designed to kill them. Concerns about rising rates of resistance to available treatment options prompted the federal government to create the five-year National Action Plan in 2015. The plan called for federal agencies to strengthen surveillance, advance the development of diagnostic tests and new antibiotics, and slow the emergence of resistant bacteria, among other things.
The precise magnitude of the problem of antibiotic resistance is unknown. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has made progress in expanding surveillance of infections from certain antibiotic-resistant bacteria in the United States and abroad but GAO’s review found that CDC faces several challenges. These include conducting surveillance for antibiotic resistance due to the limited data it is able to collect through various surveillance systems.
For example, CDC’s primary surveillance system for gonorrhea—which CDC classified as an urgent antibiotic resistance threat affecting over half a million patients annually—currently tracks only an estimated 1 to 2 percent of all U.S. cases and only in males. CDC has not fully evaluated the representativeness of the gonorrhea surveillance system’s results. However, GAO points out that it could do so, for example, by comparing the trends in their limited sample population with trends it can establish in the overall U.S. population via additional studies.
GAO found that federal agencies have taken steps to advance the development and use of diagnostic tests to identify antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, but these efforts have limitations. For example, agencies have conducted some studies to establish whether testing can lead to positive health care outcomes, such as reduced rates of antibiotic-resistant infections. However, more such studies are needed, according to experts and agency officials interviewed as part of GAO’s review.
Without information to guide test usage, clinicians may not be able to select appropriate treatments for their patients. One reason for the insufficient number of studies is that Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies that are in a position to conduct or fund such studies—such as CDC and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority—disagree about what each agency should do.
Experts also warned GAO that the current pipeline of antibiotics in development is insufficient to meet the threat of resistance. Several challenges impede the development of new treatments for resistant infections, notably inadequate return on investment for drug companies largely due to low prices and a limited patient population for whom these treatments would be appropriate.
While GAO found that HHS and Department of Defense agencies have provided financial premarket incentives to support antibiotic research and development, experts, federal officials and antibiotic developers agree that more postmarket incentives are needed to overcome the economic challenges. Advisory groups, including a presidential advisory council, and others have called for new postmarket incentives and identified multiple options for their design, including market entry rewards and reimbursement reform. But GAO said HHS has not developed a strategy to further incentivize development of new treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections, and it may need to request authority and appropriations to create and implement certain types of incentives. Until such incentives are developed, more drug companies may exit the antibiotic development sector, and the pipeline of new treatments may continue to decrease.
GAO has made eight recommendations to address the outstanding issues. These include ensuring that CDC’s evaluation of its surveillance system for antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea includes measures of the system’s representativeness of the U.S. population. Among other actions, GAO also recommends HHS identify leadership and clarify roles and responsibilities to assess the clinical outcomes of diagnostic testing; and develop a strategy to further incentivize the development of new treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections, including through the use of postmarket financial incentives. HHS agreed with the majority of the recommendations but did not concur with the recommendation that it develop a strategy that includes the use of postmarket financial incentives to encourage the development of new treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections, citing its ongoing analysis to understand whether postmarket incentives should be included in such a strategy.
