Amy Mathers, MD discusses how important it is to reduce the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria

Amy Mathers, MD, Associate Professor
Division of Infectious Diseases & International Health
UVA Department of Medicine
Transcript:
The thing I love the most about my research is the idea that I get to discover new things, and that allows me to see the world in a different way. For example, when we discover that drug resistant pathogens we're living in, hospital drains. It allowed me to look at drains and sinks differently, and I continue to try to problem solve as I look at drains and sinks to come up with better interventions to prevent them from getting to patients.
My name is Amy Mathers, and I am in both the Department of Medicine and the Department of Pathology and the School of Medicine. I am an infectious disease physician who focuses on antibiotic resistant bacteria. My research focuses on, how antibiotic resistance genes move between bacteria and how we detect them in the clinical micro lab, as well as how we detect them in the hospital, and try to eliminate transmission of drug resistant pathogens to and from patients.
With antibiotic resistant bacterial infections estimated to be the third leading cause of global deaths. It's going to be important to reduce the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria, as well as understand the places where antibiotic resistant bacteria are emerging. Unfortunately, there has not been a large amount of drug development or new antibiotic discovery, and therefore we're going to have to protect the antibiotics that we have so that they can be used for future generations.