Lectures and seminars One Health on Two Wheels: Tackling AMR from Thessaloniki to Stockholm
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) represents an escalating global health threat with profound epidemiological implications across human, animal, and environmental health sectors.
Title
One Health on Two Wheels: From Thessaloniki to Stockholm to Tackle Antimicrobial Resistance and Build Microbiology Capacity in Mbujimayi, DRC.
Speaker
Prof. Dimitri Van der Linden, pediatric infectious diseases specialist, specialized pediatrics service, Pediatric Department, Cliniques universitaires Saint-Luc, Brussels, Belgium & Institut de Recherche Expérimentale et Clinique, UCLouvain.
Summary of the lecture
This lecture will begin by outlining the current global burden and temporal trends of AMR. It will then examine the principal drivers of resistance through a One Health framework, highlighting how interconnected domains—clinical medicine, veterinary practices, agriculture, and environmental systems—contribute to its emergence and dissemination.
Particular emphasis will be placed on low-resource settings, where the burden of AMR is disproportionately high and diagnostic capacities remain limited. Field data from Nigeria, including work conducted in collaboration with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), will be used to illustrate these structural and operational challenges.
The lecture will further present the Njilabo journey, a trans-European cycling initiative from Thessaloniki to Stockholm, conceived as both a field-based observational project and a platform for interdisciplinary dialogue. Empirical observations and qualitative insights collected throughout the journey will be discussed, highlighting persistent global inequities in AMR, with particular attention to disparities along North–South and West–East gradients, especially regarding access to diagnostics, antimicrobial stewardship, and surveillance infrastructures.
This initiative also aims to foster cross-sectoral engagement while supporting a crowdfunding campaign dedicated to strengthening microbiology laboratory capacity in Mbujimayi, Democratic Republic of Congo.