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Now that’s out of the way, welcome back to an award-winning newsletter. That’s right, Uncovered beat out competition from big dogs like Bloomberg, the FT and the Economist to pick up a gong at the Newsletter Publisher Awards this week. I’m really pleased, and want to give massive credit to the team who helped redesign Uncovered a couple of years ago, and keep me on the straight and narrow filing every week.

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In April, our reporter Misbah Khan found herself in a conference room in a hotel in Lagos, surrounded by scientists and researchers from around the world. They’d gathered to talk about their progress in stemming one of the biggest unseen threats to humanity: superbugs.

What’s a superbug? Well, it’s any of the numerous bacteria that have developed resistance to the medicines usually used to treat them. This means that illnesses we were once able to cure easily now often fester and deteriorate. Sometimes they kill us. To the scientific community, it’s known as antimicrobial resistance (AMR).

Misbah has spent the past two years reporting on AMR, crisscrossing the world and gathering stories of how people in Pakistan, Ethiopia and the US were suffering from untreatable illnesses. Her work and the photos commissioned alongside her reporting were directly picked up by world leaders at the UN General Assembly last year.

Misbah, like many of our reporters, has become an expert in her own right. That level of knowledge and insight is helpful in shaping policy. Because at TBIJ we are always thinking about how our reporting can make the world a better place, we jumped at the opportunity for Misbah to support a thinktank for three months this spring.

There she helped draft a policy paper exploring how a UN-backed panel on AMR could turn the mountain of evidence on the subject into global action. No small feat.

Misbah wrote about this very strange experience, and it’s a timely read, because UK MPs this week warned that the country would struggle to respond to an AMR emergency.

In a new report, the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said the government has missed most of its key targets to tackle AMR. It’s also dropped the ball on its surveillance programme, on improving environmental protection and on engaging with other countries on the subject. Instead of taking responsibility, the PAC said, the government is dialling down what it actually wants to achieve.

“There is arguably no more haunting silhouette on the horizon for the entire world than AMR,” the committee’s chair, Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, said. “If left unchecked, it could rewind medical progress by a century.”

AMR already contributes to more than 35,000 deaths a year in the UK. Infections are becoming harder and more expensive to treat as disease-causing microbes outsmart the drugs. The PAC report warns that while the UK has strong scientific expertise, it lacks the infrastructure and coordination to scale up effectively during a crisis.

It’s a foreign policy issue as much as a domestic one, because the PAC said that future trade deals present a major AMR risk.

Post-Brexit, trade deals have been celebrated as a big win, but the PAC warned that the government hasn’t really considered how deals like the one with the US could impact our AMR resilience. This is, of course, because antibiotics are far more widely used in the US and other places, meaning imported meat could introduce resistant bacteria in the UK’s food chain.

The same is true for livestock. As Misbah wrote earlier this month, the National Audit Office (NAO) has warned that the UK is unprepared for a major outbreak of animal disease that could cost the country billions.

Trade is a factor here too. Only 5% of live animals coming into the UK are undergoing physical checks, despite a government target of 100% by late 2024, the NAO said.

Our investigation earlier this year revealed how delays in the implementation of post-Brexit checks had allowed contaminated meat to enter the UK unchecked. This coincided with a spike in foodborne illnesses, including record numbers of hospitalisations from salmonella infections.

The NAO also warned that our authorities merely react to outbreaks, rather than proactively putting measures in place to prevent these health emergencies. Even I can tell that that’s deeply worrying. The foot and mouth outbreak back in 2001 cost about £13bn in today’s money. It’s not something that’s particularly fun to contemplate happening again, especially when the government doesn’t appear to have a clue about how it’s going to fund its budget. We can’t afford to take the hit.

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Can money buy democracy?

Before I let you go, I’d like to highlight a fascinating investigation from Global Press.

India’s political landscape is being reshaped by large-scale cash transfer programs targeting women voters. Since 2020, 134 million women have benefited from these payments, amounting to 0.6% of the country’s GDP. 

While the benefits are significant, the sustainability and long-term effects on democracy remain under debate.

Global Press Shifting Democracies Fellow Raksha Kumar has charted the consequences of these programs in a three-part series Can Money Buy Democracy?

Global Press has been training and employing women to cover civil liberties, the environment and global health since 2006. Sign up to their weekly newsletter here.