It is increasingly being recognized that antibiotic resistance poses a global threat to public health. The development of strategies to tackle the problem of resistance requires a better understanding of the underlying epidemiology, both at a national and international level. This in turn requires the development of surveillance programmes that will measure the burden of infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria and their distribution in different patient populations. Surveillance data are needed to guide effective empirical therapy in settings where routine susceptibility testing is uncommon. While such surveillance programmes are well developed in some parts of the world, there is a paucity of data from many regions. The series of articles in this Supplement give an update on data from the SOAR (Survey of Antibiotic Resistance) surveillance programme, which was established some 15 years ago to provide information on local resistance patterns among the two most common respiratory pathogens, namely Streptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae, in African and Middle Eastern countries. Since its inception, SOAR has expanded and now collects data for additional pathogens (Streptococcus pyogenes and Moraxella catarrhalis) and from other geographical regions. In this series of articles, information is presented on rates of resistance in these key respiratory pathogens in several African and Middle Eastern countries, as well as the Indian sub-continent, Eastern Europe and East and Southeast Asia. Given the international scale of the threat posed by antibiotic resistance, it is hoped these data will be of relevance and interest to public health and clinical researchers around the world.
Transparency declarations
None to declare.