Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a fundamental threat to the health of human, animal, plant, and environment with potential destabilizing effects in agrifood systems, livelihoods, and economies. Laboratory diagnostics play an essential role for informing the use of antimicrobials towards successful treatments, and for detecting and characterizing AMR within surveillance systems to guide response and control strategies. However, AMR is often referred as a silent pandemic because the lack of adequate laboratory capacities and capabilities to detect drug-resistant microorganisms and resistant determinants leaves AMR as an “invisible” threat in the countries. Studies have identified the need to improve laboratory capacity and data collection systems to limit antimicrobial use and to generate more reliable and comparable data within and across sectors at local and global scale.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) would like to invite you to join the Community of Practice (CoP) on Antimicrobial Resistance Laboratory.

The FAO Community of Practice on Antimicrobial Resistance Laboratory (AMRLab-CoP) provides a platform to support continued workforce development, improving the knowledge and skills of committed and passionate laboratory experts and experts-to-be involved in the generation of AMR data for guiding therapeutic treatments, surveillance purposes, improving research outputs and creating innovative solutions for AMR laboratory diagnostics.

More specifically, the community serves to:

• Increase knowledge, competencies, confidence, and skills on laboratory methods for detection and characterization of microorganisms relevant for AMR and antimicrobial susceptibility testing;
• Provide easy access to both expert advice and support from a global, regional, or national laboratory community for knowledge sharing, brainstorming, and troubleshooting, i.e. FAO Reference Centres for AMR;
• Discuss developments within the field and stay up to date with research findings and laboratory methods;
• Encourage networking and personal development;
• Acquire social capital through informal connections, sharing expertise, peer-to-peer learning, and participating in the group;
• Have the chance to innovate and solve problems, invent new practices, create new knowledge, define new territory, and develop a collective and strategic voice.

Moreover, your participation will contribute to the collective enhancement of laboratory capacities, foster common global understanding and harmonization on the use of laboratory methods for data generation relevant for AMR, co-create evidence-based knowledge and gaps/actions/priorities identification by leveraging on CoP collective intelligence, and provide a long-lasting system of support and ongoing professional development for members.

Participation is free of charge. To join the CoP on Antimicrobial Resistance Laboratory, register here.

For any queries please contact us at: [email protected]