{"version":1,"type":"rich","provider_name":"Libsyn","provider_url":"https:\/\/www.libsyn.com","height":90,"width":600,"title":"Ramanan Laxminarayan on Antibiotic Use","description":" Let\u2019s say you were asked to name the greatest health risks facing the planet. Priceton University economist Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and director of the One Health Trust, would urgently suggest you include anti-microbial resistance near the top of that list. \u201cWe're really in the middle of a crisis right now,\u201d he tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. \u201cEvery year, about 5 million people die of infections that are associated with antibiotic resistance -- 5 million. That's nearly twice the number of people who die of HIV, TB and malaria, put together -- put together. Antibiotic resistance and associated deaths are the third leading cause of death in the world, after heart disease and stroke. So you're talking about something that's really, really big, and this is not in the future. It is right now.\u201d The underlying problem, simply put, is that humans are squandering perhaps the greatest health innovations in the last century by using antibiotics stupidly, allowing pathogens to develop resistance and thus rendering existing antibiotics worthless. For the last 30 years and in particular through One Health Trust and as director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Antimicrobial Resistance, Laxminarayan has labored to make both shine a light on anti-microbial resistance and push for policies to address it. This, he tells Edmonds, is a social science problem even more so than a medical science problem \u2013 but not the exclusive province of either. \u201cI think one of the failures of economics,\u201d he says, \u201cin some ways, is that we don't take the trouble to understand the nitty gritty of the actual other field, especially when it deals with health economics or environmental economics.\u201d In addition to his role as a senior research scholar at Princeton, Laxminarayan is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde. ","author_name":"Social Science Bites","author_url":"http:\/\/www.socialsciencebites.com","html":"