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Health care public relations leader Melanie Doupé Gaiser discusses her article, “Antimicrobial resistance needs a publicist.” She highlights antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as an urgent and deadly public health crisis that is not receiving the attention it warrants, particularly in the U.S. Melanie shares her personal stake in the issue, living with a critical antibiotic allergy, and underscores the looming threat of a post-antibiotic era where common infections could become fatal. The conversation covers the staggering potential human and economic costs of AMR, the reasons behind its low public profile despite these risks, and legislative efforts. Melanie issues a compelling call to action for everyone—researchers, health care professionals, patients, and the general public—to become “AMR publicists” by sharing stories, engaging with media, and advocating for policy changes. The key takeaway is: Collective public and professional advocacy is crucial to elevate AMR on the national agenda, drive innovation in antibiotic development, and implement policies to combat this growing global threat.

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome Melanie Doupé Gaiser. She is a health care public relations leader. Today’s KevinMD article is “Antimicrobial resistance needs a publicist.” Melanie, welcome to the show.

Melanie Doupé Gaiser: Thanks so much, Kevin. Nice to be here.

Kevin Pho: All right, so just briefly tell us a little bit about your story and then talk about the events that led you to write this KevinMD article.

Melanie Doupé Gaiser: Absolutely. So my training is in communications and public health, so AMR has always been on my radar screen as a topic of interest. I became acutely interested in it once my allergy list and my medical chart started to grow with an increasing number of antibiotics. I started realizing if I get an infection of some sort, the number of antibiotics available to me that I am not allergic to is dwindling, and there are really not very many antibiotics close to being approved. So I started to get concerned.

I was talking with some colleagues in the U.K. about this during a meeting, and they brought up the fact that AMR is in the news headlines in the U.K. all the time. And I was shocked because we almost never see AMR in the headlines here in the U.S. Last year was a bit of an exception because there was a U.N. high-level meeting on AMR, and we saw a bit of a blip in the headlines, which to me just served to be a contrast to what we usually see. It made it obvious to me that we really don’t see it in the headlines in a typical year, and we really have fallen back to where we were before the high-level meeting. We aren’t seeing AMR in the headlines.

So I started to get very curious about this, and I reached out to a couple of my reporter friends and said, “Why is this?” One of them in particular has worked on both continents, so she’s very well informed about what it takes to get a story published on the European continent and published in the U.S. And they both said it’s because nothing is happening here that gives them fodder to write about. So there’s nothing happening in Congress right now. There’s not much happening in state capitals. There aren’t any big splashy research findings that they can use as news hooks to write a story about AMR. And that’s what they need: they need a news hook to really sell the idea of an AMR story to their editors.

And I thought, this is what I do for a living. I work on behalf of health care and life science companies to elevate the visibility of issues that are important to them. This issue is important to me, so I should be using my skills to elevate this issue and get it into the headlines and really teach other people how to do that as well, because it’s going to take some traction in order to get it back into the national conversation.

Kevin Pho: So when you talk to your colleagues overseas and antimicrobial resistance is in the news there, what are the news hooks in Europe? Why is it in the headlines over there?

Melanie Doupé Gaiser: Well, a couple of things. I think that there is increased openness in European media to writing about things that are important for the public to know, regardless of whether the public happens to be talking about it at that time.

I also think that people are very close together. Countries are very close together. We’re kind of isolated here. We have a country above us, a country below us, but the rest of it’s just us, right? And so there isn’t this sort of spatial concern that forces us to really engage and discuss issues that affect populations. We also have a lot of space. You and I are both in New Hampshire. I can’t see a neighbor from where I sit. When you’re in Europe, a lot of times that isn’t necessarily the case, and you do need to be much more concerned about conditions that impact populations.

Kevin Pho: So you mentioned that you had a personal stake when it comes to antimicrobial resistance, but for the larger population, why should we care? Why should they care about antimicrobial resistance?

Melanie Doupé Gaiser: It’s a really good question, and I have an answer for that. The answer is: I took the antibiotic that I’m most acutely allergic to for my entire life through the age of 40 and suddenly became allergic to it. I was so accustomed to taking this antibiotic periodically that I didn’t even realize what was happening. It was my husband, who has no health care training and no health care background, who said, “Could this be the antibiotic that’s causing this problem in you?” And it’s a good thing he brought it up. I don’t think it would’ve occurred to me because I had taken that antibiotic so regularly, and I had Stevens-Johnson syndrome, which, as you know, can be fatal.

So we caught it in time. Really fortunate that he even brought up the idea that the antibiotic could have been the problem. But again, this happened to me out of the blue with a drug I had taken for so long, so safely, with nothing but positive results. What happened to me could happen to anyone. And each time it happens, it knocks another antibiotic off the list of possibilities that you can use to attack infections when they occur. And that’s when things start to get scary. And I think, and you’re probably aware, that there are some experts who say we’re on the cusp of a post-antibiotic era as we speak.

Some experts say we’re already in it. What this looks like is kind of scary. It means simple things like a urinary tract infection that affect so many women in particular across the world, could become what was once an easily treated, quick thing to handle, could become lethal. And that’s scary. It also makes a difference to the decisions you make around surgeries. Elective surgeries become a much more serious conversation about the balance of risks and benefits.

Kevin Pho: Certainly, in the primary care and urgent care setting that I’m familiar with, I think a lot of clinicians were more pressed for time, especially in urgent care, where there’s always an incentive to see more patients in a shorter amount of time. And sometimes a patient, for instance, comes in sick with an upper respiratory infection. Sometimes, rather than talking about the pros and cons of an antibiotic, it’s sometimes easier and quicker just to give them an antibiotic, and that may perpetuate that problem of antimicrobial resistance.

Melanie Doupé Gaiser: Overuse, misuse. And last year we had a lot of problems with shortages, drug shortages, and substandard quality drugs, for example, mail-order drugs that may not come through qualified channels can all contribute to the problem of AMR and can make it exponentially worse. It’s a multifactorial issue for sure.

Kevin Pho: So you mentioned from your background as a reporter, sometimes in order for things to get published, there needs to be some type of public policy catalyst. What about personal stories or stories that you’re hearing from patient advocates about the impact of antimicrobial resistance? Do stories like that get publicized that help with the news cycle in getting this issue out there?

Melanie Doupé Gaiser: In fact, one of the biggest suggestions I have in helping people get reporters interested in their stories is to really personalize it and humanize it. Even for scientists who are doing AMR research, putting a face on that research can help get them into the news.

But I think for people, for clinicians or for patients who have been through this experience of having a very difficult-to-treat infection, reaching out to reporters or even writing an opinion piece, writing a letter to the editor about your experience and talking about what you, your family, your health care providers went through trying to get you out to the other side, on the healthy side of things, can really help. Reporters really want that human face, the human impact of a story. And in the absence of splashy new research results or an impending phase three clinical trial readout or FDA approval, these are ways that you can really help get some traction with media and help get this back into the national conversation.

Kevin Pho: So you mentioned earlier about putting a face on science, like humanizing it, personal stories. So tell us from a scientific standpoint, why is that so important in terms of putting that human face on it to make their stories resonate?

Melanie Doupé Gaiser: Telling a story in a scientific journal is an entirely different endeavor than it is when you’re telling a story to a reporter who’s writing for the general public. Even if you’re talking to a reporter who’s writing for trade media focused on health care or pharma, you really need to have something other than just those statistics and the scientific findings to talk about in order to really get them interested because they’re writing for a larger public. They’re not just writing for scientists or other clinicians; they’re writing for people who don’t have that background. And in order to really bring it to a level where people are going to read beyond the first sentence—they want them to read the whole article, they want them to click on things—you need to pull in facts and details that are of interest to a broader population.

And that can be challenging when you have such a high degree of training and are so accustomed to using very technical jargon. But what I generally recommend when people are talking with reporters, people who have this sort of scientific or clinical training, is to really think about things from the standpoint of the public. If you were talking to your 15-year-old nephew who hasn’t gone to med school or who hasn’t gone through a doctoral program, how would you explain what you experienced to that person so that they understand? How and what are the interesting things about the story from your own personal experience that you would bring into it to get that 15-year-old excited about it and maybe even want to go on and study it in school? Those are the sorts of things that are going to attract reporter attention and then allow you to get into the nitty-gritty details.

Kevin Pho: Now you mentioned that sometimes we don’t have that policy hook that gets these stories published specifically related to antimicrobial resistance. In your article, you talk about the Pasteur Act, a bipartisan bill that has stalled. Tell us a little bit about that act or if you know anything else in the pipeline from a legislative standpoint that addresses this issue.

Melanie Doupé Gaiser: So there are a number of different ways that people have talked about creating legislation that would help address AMR. One of the ways that they’re thinking about addressing it is by increasing the incentives for pharmaceutical companies to develop new antibiotic products. The reason this is important is because when you think about the development of a drug, it’s a very expensive process, right? So there needs to be a market at the end of that in order to justify the cost to bring a product through the development process.

When you’re looking at antibiotics in particular, there’s a disincentive because in order to be good antibiotic stewards, it requires limiting their use to very specific circumstances and very specific periods of time, which limits the market potential for the drug, right? So, some of the things that legislators have been talking about to address this situation are almost like subscription plans, so like you and I might subscribe to a streaming service. This would look like the government doing something similar with a pharmaceutical manufacturer who makes a new antibiotic: paying a monthly fee, regardless of how much of that antibiotic is needed by the public, so that there’s a degree of assurance for that pharmaceutical company from the get-go that if they are successful in finding and bringing a new antibiotic to market, that they will be able to recoup some of the costs of that drug development.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Melanie Doupé Gaiser. She’s a health care public relations leader, and today’s KevinMD article is “Antimicrobial resistance needs a publicist.” Melanie, let’s end with some take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Melanie Doupé Gaiser: Well, the first thing I want to say is that reporters really do want to cover AMR. The people that I reached out to and asked them why isn’t this being covered in the U.S.? They expressed frustration about it. They expressed frustration because they understand the import of the subject, they understand its effect, its potential effect on entire populations, and they want to be able to do something about it.

But we need to help them be able to do something about it. We need to bring them stories. We need to write letters to the editor, like I mentioned, or opinion pieces, and get it into the public eye so that they can see the interest start to pick up. Once they see the interest pick up among the public, their editors will be more open to letting them write about these topics.

Podcasts are a great opportunity to tell a really rich story, right? Sometimes a traditional interview where there is an article that results, they don’t allow you as much opportunity to tell a rich story because from your 20- or 30-minute interview, only two or three quotes might be included in the resulting article. But in a podcast situation, you get to tell your story with all of the rich detail. Then you publish it on LinkedIn, you talk about it on LinkedIn and get your audience engaged with it. That expands it even further. And these are little steps toward getting the topic the attention that it deserves.

Kevin Pho: Melanie, thank you so much for sharing your perspective and insight, and thanks again for coming on the show.

Melanie Doupé Gaiser: Thanks so much, Kevin.