In a statement released yesterday evening at the World Economic Forum in Davos, about 100 pharmaceutical companies and trade associations said that governments should help solve the issue of no new antibiotics by funding and creating incentives for new drugs development.

They said that the value given to antibiotics and diagnostics generally doesn’t reflect the advantages they bring to society, nor the investment needed for their creation. They added, “We call on governments to commit to allocating the funds needed to create a sustainable and predictable market for these technologies while also implementing the measures needed to safeguard the effectiveness of antibiotics”.

The Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology and Diagnostics Industries’ Declaration on Combating Antimicrobial Resistance promises the companies, including both the biggest like Merck & Co. and Pfizer Inc., and a number of tiny biotech firms and makers of diagnostic devices, to a common set of global actions to fight resistance.

The actions include decreasing overuse, encouragement to the diagnostic devices development that can save the drugs from getting overused, and antibiotics’ conservation in a manner usually called ‘stewardship’—which, by placing the critically needed drugs on the shelf, can cut into company profits. Thus, the governments and others funders have been called to join the companies in pursuing new drugs for reaching a solution to what’s called the ‘pipeline problem’.

This was the harsh reality that antibiotics manufacturers abandoned the field practically after nearly 2000, because the relatively low retail cost of their along with the advance of antimicrobial resistance turned development of antibiotics into an unrewarding move.

The Infectious Diseases Society of America flagged the issue of ‘bad bugs, no drugs’ in a revelatory report 12 years back, since then policy makers have been arguing over how they can best lure drugmakers to bring them back into the market, by proposing patent extensions, prizes, price hikes, up-front payments, and a number of other incentives.