42 U.S.C. § 247d–5 — Combating antimicrobial resistance

(a) Task force The Secretary must set up an Antimicrobial Resistance Task Force to advise the Secretary and coordinate federal antimicrobial-resistance programs. Instead of creating a new one, the Secretary may use an existing committee or organization — one that existed as of November 13, 2000 — as the task force, if it meets this section's requirements. The task force must include representatives from the federal agencies the Secretary picks, and must get input from public health groups, manufacturers, veterinary and medical professional societies, and others the Secretary thinks are needed, in order to build and carry out a full plan against antimicrobial resistance. The task force must consider factors the Secretary thinks are relevant, including: what is driving rising resistance; public health needs for detecting and tracking resistance; strategies to detect, prevent, and control resistant pathogens; the need for better data; assessing the risk each pathogen poses to public health; and any other relevant issues. Working with the task force and state and local officials, the Secretary must develop, improve, or expand participation in a surveillance plan to detect and track emerging resistance, and in an information system that lets health departments share resistance data with each other. The task force must meet at least twice a year, or more often if the Secretary decides that is needed. (b) Research and development of new antimicrobial drugs and diagnostics Following the task force's recommendations, the Secretary and the Director of Agricultural Research Services must fund research — directly, or through grants or cooperative agreements — on: new treatments, including vaccines and antimicrobials, against resistant pathogens; new or improved diagnostic tests to detect resistant pathogens; the epidemiology, mechanisms, and biology of resistance; genome sequencing and other DNA or comparative analysis of priority pathogens, chosen by the Director of the National Institutes of Health with the task force, done together with the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute; and other relevant research areas. (c) Education of medical and public health personnel After consulting the Assistant Secretary for Health, the Surgeon General, the CDC Director, the Health Resources and Services Administration, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, task force members, professional groups, and other officials as needed, the Secretary must: build public-awareness programs about the threat of antimicrobial resistance and proper antibiotic use; build training programs for health care workers on using antibiotics wisely; and build training programs for lab staff on recognizing and identifying resistant pathogens. (d) Grants The Secretary must give competitive grants to eligible groups to build their capacity to detect, track, and fight antimicrobial resistance. Eligible groups are state or local public health agencies, Indian tribes or tribal organizations, and other nonprofit public or private groups. Grant recipients must spend the money on activities matching the task force's factors from subsection (a)(3), which may include training staff to spot resistance patterns quickly and accurately, building information systems to share resistance data fast among health agencies and providers, and creating policies to stop resistance from spreading. (e) Grants for demonstration programs The Secretary must give competitive grants to eligible groups to run demonstration programs that promote smart antimicrobial use or control the spread of resistant pathogens. Eligible groups may include hospitals, clinics, long-term care facilities, professional medical societies, schools that train medical lab staff, and other nonprofit groups. The Secretary must give appropriate technical help to grant recipients. (f) Monitoring at Federal health care facilities The Secretary must encourage the Department of Defense, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Indian Health Service to report combined data on antimicrobial drug use, resistance, and stewardship programs at their facilities, and must give technical help to the Secretaries of Defense and Veterans Affairs, as appropriate and on request. (g) Report on antimicrobial resistance in humans and use of antimicrobial drugs Within 1 year of December 13, 2016, and every year after, the Secretary must publish data on: national and regional trends in human antimicrobial resistance, including for drugs approved under section 356(h) of title 21; antimicrobial stewardship efforts, which may include state-level summaries; and coordination between the CDC Director and the Commissioner of Food and Drugs on monitoring that resistance and those approved drugs. (h) Information related to antimicrobial stewardship programs The Secretary must share guidance, education, and other materials to help health care facilities — such as nursing homes and other long-term care facilities, ambulatory surgical centers, dialysis centers, outpatient clinics, and hospitals, including community and rural hospitals — build and run evidence-based antimicrobial stewardship programs. (i) Supporting State-based activities to combat antimicrobial resistance The Secretary must keep working with state and local health departments on statewide or regional antimicrobial-resistance programs, which may include identifying resistance patterns, preventing the spread of resistant infections, and promoting antimicrobial stewardship. (j) Antimicrobial resistance and stewardship activities To support stewardship activities, track changes in resistance, and check how well drugs approved under section 356(h) of title 21 are working, the Secretary must give facilities a way to report their stewardship data and outcomes, and must evaluate resistance data using a standard method and drug-use trends by patient group. The Secretary must use existing systems, such as the National Healthcare Safety Network or others the Secretary identifies, to do this work. (k) Network of antibiotic resistance regional laboratories Through the CDC Director, the Secretary must, as appropriate, maintain a network of antibiotic-resistance laboratory sites, within the CDC's existing lab capacity, to: identify and track patterns in resistant pathogens; detect, identify, confirm, and isolate resistant pathogens, including doing this for other labs on request and helping respond to local or regional outbreaks; and support diagnosis of resistant pathogens and testing which treatments a pathogen sample will respond to. The Secretary must spread this capacity fairly across the geographic regions of the United States. These labs may be based at academic centers, state health departments, or other public or private facilities that already do this kind of laboratory or public health surveillance work. (l) International collaboration With other federal agencies, the Secretary must support work on antimicrobial resistance internationally, including by funding research on resistant pathogens — even ones not yet found in the United States — improving related surveillance and lab capacity, and giving technical assistance on controlling resistant infections. To do this, the Secretary may award grants, contracts, or cooperative agreements, including to nongovernmental organizations, to support new and innovative ways to prevent, detect, and reduce antimicrobial-resistant pathogens. (m) Antimicrobial For subsections (f) through (j), "antimicrobial" includes antibacterial and antifungal drugs, and may include other drugs that eliminate or slow the growth of microorganisms, as appropriate. (n) Supplement not supplant Money from this section must add to, and not replace, other federal, state, and local public funding already provided for these activities. (o) Authorization of appropriations Congress authorized $40,000,000 for fiscal year 2001, $25,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2002 and 2003, and whatever amount is necessary for each of fiscal years 2004 through 2006.