Abstract
More than 10 years ago ‘The Microbial Threat’ was the fi rst of a series of invitational EU conferences making antimicrobial resistance an offi cial EU issue. (1) Its recommendations initiated the European Antimicro-bial Resistance Surveillance System (EARSS; www.rivm.nl/earss), the European Surveillance of Antimicrobial Consumption (ESAC; www.esac.ua.ac.be), and the es-tablishment of antimicrobial National Focal Points like, for Belgium, the Belgian Antibiotic Policy Coordination Committee (BAPCOC; www.health.fgov.be/antibiotics). EARSS and ESAC data identifi ed Belgium as one of the countries with high consumption and resistance, two characteristics signifi cantly associated at an ecological level in Europe, (2) as well as showing a cause-effect relationship in a randomised controlled trial with healthy volunteers. (3) And since for humans most antibiotics are being consumed in ambulatory care, during the last decade several measures were adopted in Belgium at the national level to improve antibiotic use in ambulatory care. And these measures did not miss their effect on both outpatient antibiotic use and antimicrobial resistance.
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