Earth's resources are limited, which we are reminded of daily through the media. Similarly, effective antibiotics, malaria, and HIV medications are limited and shared resources that are now under threat, with enormous consequences when it comes to providing effective healthcare.

And like clean air and a good climate, this is a global issue where no walls or a Mediterranean can protect us from the "problems of others".

All Swedes who genealogy can read about relatives who died in, for example, pneumonia. Then came the penicillin, and pneumonia became a curable disease. Despite this, last year 800,000 children died before the age of five around the world - in the most common pneumonia.

Not yet because of antibiotic resistance, which lurks around the corner and threatens us all, but because of wrong diagnosis, or malpractice and lack of preventative measures, such as vaccination.

The paradox is that while sub-medicine antibiotics are found virtually everywhere in the world, 800,000 children die of pneumonia because they are not receiving the right treatment - or because they have not received a preventative vaccination.

At the same time, and in the same parts of the world, antibiotics are unnecessarily used to treat common cough.

Of course, the world needs new effective antibiotics, and the right incentive to develop them. But above all, the new perspective is needed :

  • We need and can prevent infections. Running water at the care center to the midwife's hands before giving birth; breastfeeding and good food and vaccination for everyone.
  • We need and can use antibiotics rationally. All the sick, all over the world, need to find a competent healthcare provider who can make the right diagnosis and issue the right medicine.
  • We need, but do not yet have the system, to produce existing and new antibiotics in a sustainable way. For example, Sweden, like the rest of the world, has a shortage of the so important Penicillin G, which is now only produced in two factories in China.
  • We need to educate the entire world's population in the same way as in Sweden - to understand that antibiotics are a life-saving medicine but should not be taken unnecessarily.

This is our analysis at UNICEF; and how we want to help humanity to benefit from the advances of medicine in the future.

So what can Sweden's people, politicians and government do?

Firstly, it is important to understand that effective antibiotics, malaria and HIV medicines are a common global but limited resource. We all sit in the same boat - just like with the climate.

And that is why joint global efforts are required to defend these resources, and the healthcare we have become accustomed to, whether it is treatment of pneumonia, prosthetic surgery or cancer treatment.

This means that we humans need to have a consistent approach:

As a consumer, you have to be careful what foods you choose - how much antibiotics are actually used for that cheap pork can and the air-dried ham?

And finally, "The world's problems are our problems."

By increasing the competence and capacity of the poorest countries, we can jointly save the effective resource that antibiotics are.

In other words: it is just like the climate.