World Antibiotic Awareness Week: “Antibiotics: Handle with Care”

Striving to advocate for prudent use of antibiotics in the global arena and thus contribute to one of the key objectives of the global action plan endorsed at the Sixty-eighth World Health Assembly in May 2015, the first World Antibiotic Awareness Week (WAAW) will be organized from 16 to 22 November 2015.

Titled “Antibiotics: Handle with Care”, the one-week campaign aims to improve awareness and understanding of the growing problem of resistance to antibiotics and other antimicrobial medicines as well as to encourage best practices among the general public, health workers and policy makers to avoid the further emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance.

WHO/Europe acknowledges the importance of the first World Antibiotic Awareness Week by releasing the first CAESAR report on antibiotic resistance in five non-EU countries in the WHO European Region (Belarus, Serbia, Switzerland, Turkey and Republic of Macedonia).

WAAW continues and broadens the scope of the European Antibiotic Awareness Day (November 18) that our country will be celebrating for the eighth time this year.

This year’s EAAD celebration in Macedonia will consist of several activities i.e. distribution of promotional materials and a CAESAR Network National Meeting to be organized on November 16 by the Association of Microbiologists of the Republic of Macedonia in collaboration with Studiorum and with technical and financial support of the WHO Regional Office for Europe and the WHO Country Office. In the period between November 9 and 27, educational lectures will be held in five elementary schools in Skopje and in five hospitals in the country tackling the issues of hand hygiene and use of antibiotics and those of rational use of antibiotics, AMR and use of clinical guidelines respectively.