■ Website Goals

The website was created by the National Health Research Institutes (NHRI) to provide accessible and comprehensive information on issues associated with infectious diseases, antibiotic consumption, and antimicrobial resistance to the government, the scientific society, the medical community, and the general public.

Due to the high prevalence of antimicrobial resistance and its associated health and economic impacts, the topic of antibiotic use is regarded as an urgent and critical problem by the World Health Organization (WHO). A global action plan to tackleantimicrobial resistance was endorsed at the sixty-eighth World Health Assembly in May 2015. The plan lists five strategic objectives:

• to improve awareness and understanding of antimicrobial resistance
• to strengthen knowledge through surveillance and research
• to reduce the incidence of infection
• to optimize the use of antimicrobial agents
• to economically develop a sustainable investment that takes into account the needs of all countries, and to increase investment into new medicines, diagnostic tools, vaccines and other interventions.

To better understand antimicrobial resistance, the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) encourages a reliable surveillance system for the prevalence of infectious diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and antibiotic consumption inhospitals, outpatient facilities and the community, as well as in veterinary medicine and in animal husbandry. The NHRI is dedicated to the improvement of health care in Taiwan, including a plan to decrease antimicrobial resistance. Therefore, thiswebsite Taiwan Antimicrobial Resistance Network was created to improve awareness and understanding of antimicrobial use and infectious disease, and to strengthen knowledge about antimicrobial resistance in Taiwan through surveillance.The policies and efforts to reduce the incidence of infectious disease, and to optimize the use of antimicrobial agents can also be assessed using the information from the website.

■ Team Members

The website Taiwan Antimicrobial Resistance Network was created by the integrated efforts of many departments, and includes data collected from the Taiwan Center for Disease Control (CDC), the National Health Insurance (NHI) Administration, and the NHRI. The intellectual material maintained in the website is the result of cooperation between NHRI’s National Institute of Infectious Disease and Vaccinology and Institute of Population Health Sciences which have a long-standing collaboration in the analysis of epidemiology of antibiotic use and antimicrobial resistance.