Working Together: What We Have to GAIN

By Sen. Richard Blumenthal

Imagine you are recovering from a routine surgery only to find yourself fighting for your life a few days later because of a bacterial infection that was acquired as a result of the procedure. To make matters worse, traditional medicines are proving ineffective at battling the infection. That’s what happened to Jamel Sawyer, a former college football player from Norwalk, Conn., who knows the crippling impact all too well after contracting an antibiotic-resistant Staph infection. After multiple rounds of antibiotic treatment, Jamel was left paralyzed from the waist down. This frightening scenario is an emerging reality as these “super bugs” – named so for their resistance to known antibiotics – are becoming more pervasive throughout the country and the world.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that MRSA – a drug-resistant strain of Staph bacteria – is responsible for more than 17,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, more than AIDS. A lesser-known bug, Acinetobacter, has infected more than 700 of our troops serving in Iraq since 2003. The stagnant drug development pipeline in this area has caused the World Health Organization to name antibiotic-resistant infections one of the “three greatest threats to human health.” I am proud to introduce the Generating Antibiotics Incentives Now ("GAIN") Act with my colleague, Senator Bob Corker from Tennessee. I believe that we must work together for patients like Jamel all around the world to fight back against this dangerous epidemic. We must harness nature and American ingenuity to win the real-life race against the super bugs.

By Sen. Bob Corker

Despite incredible scientific advancements over the years, health-care providers across the globe lack antibiotics capable of combating increasingly dangerous bacterial infections. These “super bugs” have become resistant to traditional antibiotics, while the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of new antibiotics has decreased by 70 percent since the mid-1980s.

According to the Infectious Diseases Society of America, 100,000 deaths and 360,000 hospitalizations result from such infections annually in the U.S. These infections are especially dangerous for our younger generations with compromised immune systems.

Dr. William Evans, CEO of the renowned St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee, recently wrote, “We don’t want to find ourselves in a situation in which we have been able to save a child’s life after a cancer diagnosis, only to lose them to an untreatable multi-drug resistant infection.”

This is why I have joined Senator Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., to introduce the Generating Antibiotic Incentives Now (“GAIN”) Act. Our legislation encourages development of new antibiotics through meaningful market incentives without putting federal dollars at stake and also reduces regulatory burdens to bring effective treatments to market more quickly. We have a responsibility to act now to protect citizens, especially our vulnerable youth, from this increasingly dangerous threat.