Sharing antimicrobial expertise with Parliament

In September 2022, a new Parliamentary Internship Programme, funded by the British Society for Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (BSAC), offered a unique opportunity for two PhD students to work alongside Green Party peer, Baroness Natalie Bennett, to help make antimicrobial resistance (AMR) a more central part of political discourse.

In recent years, AMR and specifically the One Health agenda that aims to protect the interconnected health of humans, animals and the environment, has faded from the attention of the UK government and it is hoped that the internship will enable academics with expertise in this area to feed into policy decisions and to help hold the government to account.

One of the first cohort of interns is Emily Stevenson; a second-year PhD student investigating microplastics as vectors for AMR in aquatic systems.