The Challenge: Africa Union (AU) Member States and stakeholders previously identified the lack of standardized clinical treatment guidelines that outline when and how to treat infectious diseases as a barrier to reducing inappropriate antimicrobial use (AMU) and mitigating antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the human healthcare sector. Except for select diseases, such as HIV, TB, and malaria, healthcare providers across the continent often must use their individual judgment or rely on guidelines developed outside of Africa to treat infectious diseases.

What We Did: CDDEP and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) convened an interdisciplinary panel of infectious disease clinicians and public health experts from across AU member states to develop a first edition of the African Antibiotic Treatment Guidelines for Common Bacterial Infections and Syndromes.

Why It Matters: The guidelines fill a critical gap in providing healthcare workers across the African continent with expert recommendations for antimicrobial selection, dosage, and duration of treatment for common bacterial infections and syndromes.

The full guidelines and quick reference guides in Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish are available for download. An accompanying article describing the guidelines development methodologies titled, “Development of the first edition of African treatment guidelines for common bacterial infections and syndromes,” is available online from the Journal of Public Health in Africa here.

This work was supported by the Training Programs in Epidemiology and Public Health Interventions Network (TEPHINET).