Welcome to the course

ROSANNA PEELING: Hello, and welcome to our course, Diagnostics for Antimicrobial Resistance, or AMR for short. Building back better after the COVID-19 pandemic. My name is Rosanna Peeling, and I’m your lead educator I’m a professor of diagnostics research and the Director of the International Diagnostics Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

NOAH FONGWEN: And I’m Noah Fongwen. And I’ll be your core educator for this course. I’m a clinician and a clinical research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

ROSANNA PEELING: Over the last 18 months, our lives have been turned upside down by a novel coronavirus, which is a genetic relative of the virus responsible for the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, SARS.

NOAH FONGWEN: This COVID-19 pandemic has taught us many lessons on the use of diagnostics, the need for pandemic preparedness, and the potential of the diagnostic industry to innovate. More tests have been produced for COVID-19 than for any other disease to date.

ROSANNA PEELING: While the AMR programmes in many countries have suffered setbacks because of the frequent use of antibiotics for COVID patients, we should not lose this opportunity to leverage the lessons learned and the technological advances made to avert a future global catastrophe due to multi-drug resistant bacteria.

NOAH FONGWEN: In 2018, we launched the first course, the Role of Diagnostics in the AMR Response. And we reached more than 11,000 learners. Once again, we’ve partnered with Becton Dickinson and Company and experts around the world to develop this MOOC on building back better for a more robust AMR response.

ROSANNA PEELING: Over the next three weeks, we’ll come together to examine the positive and negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on AMR programmes and explore opportunities to build back better.

NOAH FONGWEN: We will feature videos, articles, case studies, and discussion forum. At the end of each week, you can take a quiz to see what you’ve learned. All of our course materials are downloadable to facilitate classroom teaching, tutorials, and in-service training in health care institutions.

ROSANNA PEELING: We invite all of you to take part in our discussion forum and share with us your experiences and knowledge of AMR and diagnostics. So let’s get started.