UN’s new global health advisory body must include lower income countries – report

Dr Hannah Hughes

The new UN body charged with providing evidence to tackle drug-resistant diseases needs to include lower income countries, according to an Aberystwyth academic.

Drug resistance – when diseases no longer respond as well to antibiotics and other treatments – has been identified by the World Health Organisation as a top threat to global public health. 

It undermines the effectiveness of medicines relied upon in both human and animal healthcare, with serious implications for health systems worldwide.

Experts say that the rise of drug-resistance infections, including Tuberculosis and MRSA, is driven by factors such as antibiotic overuse, poor infection control, and global travel.

In response to the growing threat, in September last year, the UN General Assembly decided to establish an independent advisory panel to support global efforts to tackle antimicrobial resistance by the end of this year.

Dr Hannah Hughes from the Department of International Politics at Aberystwyth University was commissioned by the Center for Global Development to advise on the structures of the new body.

Her report draws lessons from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - the world’s largest scientific advisory body – to inform the design of the new panel.

The report highlights two key priorities – ensuring that scientific findings are translated into action, and enabling meaningful participation from low and middle income countries. 

Among the recommendations to the UN, Dr Hughes proposes establishing a dedicated trust fund to support lower and middle income countries’ participation and calls for broader geographical representation within the panel.

Dr Hannah Hughes from Aberystwyth University, who will discuss these findings further at a UN meeting later this month, commented:

“It has been an honour to provide input to the development of this new body, which is so crucial to the health of the entire world.

“Our report draws on the experience of the IPCC to identify two critical areas for the early design phase of the new microbial resistance panel: ensuring that knowledge is acted upon, and enabling equitable participation from low and middle income countries.

“We found that involving both experts and decision makers in the assessment process is essential to ensure relevance and credibility. At the same time, meaningful participation requires addressing barriers such as resource constraints, unequal access to scientific literature, and challenges in sustaining engagement over time.

“Addressing this requires investing in capacity-building strategies such as trust funds, regional representation, skill-building, and support for underrepresented voices. These two priorities – actionable knowledge and inclusive participation - are interlinked.  A successful antimicrobial resistance panel must be a learning organisation— open to reflection, responsive to feedback, and capable of adapting its practices.

“Ultimately, success will depend on balancing scientific authority with inclusiveness, and producing outputs that are legitimate, trusted, and actionable across diverse contexts.”

Dr Hughes has been researching the IPCC since 2008 and published a significant text ‘The IPCC and the Politics of Writing Climate Change’ in 2024. For this latest report, she conducted a series of roundtables with IPCC experts to identify key lessons relevant to the new body. She presented the draft findings at an international meeting in Lagos, Nigeria, in April this year.

The final report will form part of ongoing consultations with governments and stakeholders on the design of the new antimicrobial resistance panel.

Anthony McDonnell, from the Center for Global Development and co-author on the paper, added:

“As the UN looks to establish an independent scientific panel on antimicrobial resistance, the IPCC provides a useful case study. In this report, Hannah Hughes skilfully draws out lessons from decades of climate science–policy engagement, showing how global panels can balance authority with inclusiveness, and how design choices can make the difference between reports that sit on the shelf and those that drive action. Her insights will be invaluable as consultations move forward on the future Anti-Microbial Resistance panel.”

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