my research

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR)—the process by which micro-organisms become resistant to the drugs we normally use to treat them—is often conceptualised as a purely biomedical problem that threatens all of us and our access to life-saving treatments. While AMR is associated with over five million deaths annually, and treatment of drug-resistant bacterial infections alone costs an estimated $412bn, the burden of AMR is not felt evenly across all populations and communities.

In high-income countries like the UK, disparities in the incidence, prevalence and consequence of drug-resistant infections are the product of avoidable health inequalities, which in turn result from a complex combination of systemic societal inequalities like structural racism and socioeconomic deprivation. Unfortunately, the 'lifting all boats' approach has failed to redress—and may actually obscure—the historical and contemporary injustices that produce health inequalities; for a problem like AMR, where the preservation of effective antimicrobials as a 'public good' benefits us all, the need to challenge and dismantle the structural causes of health inequality is paramount.

My aim is to direct and enable equity-focused interventions to mitigate the threat of AMR with a focus on marginalised populations and communities in high-income countries (HICs). I focus on the Global North as health inequalities in HICs are critically overlooked and are undermined by the outwards-facing, neo-colonial perspective of the global health discipline. By working with the 'Global South in the Global North', my goal is to disrupt sociopolitical and epistemological hierarchies by creating partnerships that allow us to learn and apply lessons in dismantling health inequalities that defy the political geography of the North/South divide.

I'm interested in all axes of inequality and their relation to AMR. To date, I've balanced projects on:

• Building the evidence base for the effect of socioeconomic deprivation on the burden of AMR

• Hostile immigration policy and its contribution to migrant health injustices

• The environmental injustices associated with AMR in wastewater