AMR Project for Ukirine

Why AMR Projects Are Urgently Needed During the Ukraine War

1. Collapse of Medical Infrastructure and Rising Infections
   The war in Ukraine has severely damaged hospitals, clinics, and laboratories, leading to deteriorated hygiene conditions and a sharp increase in infections such as wound infections, post-surgical complications, and community-acquired diseases.

2. Widespread and Unregulated Use of Antibiotics
   In war zones, antibiotics are often overused for infection prevention. Without proper prescription control, this creates an ideal environment for the rapid emergence and spread of antimicrobial-resistant organisms.

3. Mass Displacement and Cross-Border Transmission
   Millions of refugees have fled Ukraine, increasing the risk of cross-border spread of resistant bacteria across Europe and neighboring regions.

4. Lack of Real-Time Surveillance
   Ukraine currently lacks sufficient AMR surveillance infrastructure, posing a risk not only to the country but to global and regional health security as well.

5. Laying the Groundwork for Post-War Recovery
   AMR surveillance and response systems must be built now to support post-war reconstruction and establish sustainable infectious disease management systems for the future.

Challenges in Developing an AMR Surveillance System

In conclusion, the AMR project is not merely a public health initiative—it is a critical element of wartime response, post-conflict recovery planning, and the protection of European and global health security.

1. Data fragmentation and lack of standardization
Health facilities often use different formats and coding systems for reporting AST results, microbial names, antibiotic abbreviations, and diagnoses. Many rely on paper-based records, making integration across regions extremely difficult. Unstructured text reports further complicate automated processing and analysis.

2. Inconsistent laboratory capacity and quality
Laboratories vary widely in terms of diagnostic equipment, microbiological techniques, and technician skill levels. This leads to non-uniform data quality, poor reproducibility, and unreliable national-level surveillance outcomes.

3. Lack of real-time surveillance and integrated analytics
AMR reporting in many low-resource or post-conflict regions is retrospective, manual, and disconnected. There is limited capacity to monitor resistance trends as they emerge or respond to them in real-time at a national scale.

4. No unified semantic layer or domain-specific ontology
The absence of a structured semantic framework hinders the meaningful linking of data across hospitals, labs, and regions. Without standard definitions of organisms, drugs, sample types, and resistance interpretations, data aggregation and AI-driven analytics remain inaccurate.

5. Antibiotic consumption data is not linked with resistance data
Prescription records are often siloed from resistance test results, making it difficult to analyze the correlation between drug usage patterns and rising resistance. Additionally, there's limited differentiation between treatment, prophylaxis, and empirical use.

6. Shortage of trained technical and interdisciplinary staff
Running an AMR surveillance system requires expertise in microbiology, health informatics, data governance, and epidemiology—roles that are in short supply, especially in fragile or transitioning health systems.

7. Weak feedback loops between surveillance and public health action
Even when resistance data is collected, it is rarely translated into timely policy, regulation, or clinical interventions. The system often fails to inform antibiotic stewardship, procurement strategies, or infection control policy.