By the bioMérieux Connection Editors
It’s that time of year when we all try to do a bit of reflection, asking ourselves how we can be better and coming up with a laundry list of personal resolutions—many of which we don’t accomplish during the year. In the last decade, a popular solution has been to focus on a single word to guide your actions for the coming year. Distilling your goals into a simple word makes it easier to broadly apply in your everyday life.
Here at bioMérieux Connection, and throughout bioMérieux, Inc., we’ve been thinking a lot about our mission and what we hope to accomplish in 2020 and beyond. We have readers from many professions and many walks of life, so our goal has always been to provide accessible resources for learning and thoughtful insight on contemporary public health issues related to infectious disease.
As the world evolves—socially, politically, technologically, biologically—so must our approaches to healthcare. Improving public health sounds broad, but its realization is in individuals—you, your friends, your family. And, everyone has a role to play, no matter your profession or educational background.
Every human being can contribute positively to their own health and the health of others. That is the essence of stewardship, our word for 2020. As it applies to our mission to fight infectious diseases, stewardship means preserving antibiotics and other critical drugs for future generations by using diagnostic tools to help guide and optimize treatment.
It means following your doctor’s instructions and taking medications exactly as prescribed. It means taking steps to prevent infectious diseases, like washing your hands and getting vaccinated. It means using antibiotics in animals only to treat infections. It means reducing the quantity of antibiotics released into our soil and waterways. It means providing adequate sanitation and access to health services. It means supporting and conducting research to improve our knowledge and provide better healthcare. It means innovating, in our technology, our thinking, our processes, and our policies.
That is why stewardship is a team effort. In 2020, we will do our part as educators to provide information, resources, and insights to help us all be better stewards in the fight against antimicrobial resistance and infectious disease.
To Stewardship!
Opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of bioMérieux, Inc.
