From patients to doctors: the battle against antibiotic resistance starts in Turin

Combating antibiotic resistance means tackling one of the most serious and least visible health emergencies of our time. In Italy the phenomenon has particularly critical dimensions, with the European record for the number of deaths related to antibiotic-resistant infections: more than 12 thousand people die every year from infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, equal to about one third of the 35 thousand deaths caused by antibiotic resistance in the European Union, according to the most recent data from the European Centre for Disease Control. If trends are not reversed, antimicrobial resistance could become the leading cause of death in our country by 2050, overtaking cancer and cardiovascular disease. It is from this awareness that L'antiiotico si cura was born, the initiative promoted by the Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo together with the Asl Città di Torino, presented in November 2025 and destined to come to life during 2026.

The project is a systemic intervention that goes beyond the logic of individual information campaigns, aiming at an integrated prevention model based on Circular Health and the One Health paradigm, which considers human, animal and environmental health as parts of a single ecosystem. "In 2026 we will work on three integrated fronts: citizen empowerment, training of professionals and targeted interventions on specific settings," explains Marco Gilli, chairman of the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation. Empowerment means informing and equipping citizens with skills, tools and responsibilities: i.e. knowing how to recognise when an antibiotic is necessary, how to follow treatment correctly, take preventive measures and dispose of drugs safely.

The L'antiiotico si cura campaign will be multi-channel (online and offline) and focused on the places of territorial medicine - family doctors' surgeries, paediatricians, pharmacies - with practical messages: hand hygiene, appropriate use and correct elimination of pharmacological residues. The second front is the continuous training of doctors and pharmacists; the third, targeted interventions in hospitals and territorial services. A distinctive element is the network of Ambassadors: representatives of professional orders, ARPA, the Zooprophylactic Institute and the Banco Farmaceutico. They will act as cultural amplifiers, promoting hand hygiene, appropriate use of antibiotics and proper drug management.

The choice of Turin as a pilot city responds to a precise logic: the Asl Città di Torino already has advanced skills, programmes and operational tools and was immediately ready to build a structured alliance. The project was thus conceived as an ambitious and long-term experiment, with the aim of becoming a replicable model in other territorial contexts. The scientific coordination of the initiative is entrusted to Ilaria Capua, virologist and Senior Fellow of Global Health at the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Europe in Bologna, and international reference of the One Health paradigm. 'This project represents the concretisation of circular health and the One Health concept,' says Capua. "It is essential to create an alliance between different professional groups, to make them dialogue and turn them into active interlocutors. But above all, it is necessary to bring together a bottom-up movement, involving citizenship, with existing top-down policies'. At the heart of the scientific vision is also the valorisation of big data from hospitals and veterinary medicine, to guide decisions and measure the impact of interventions, and the direct involvement of citizens, frail patients and families affected by serious cases of resistant infections, valorising lived experience as a lever of awareness.

Italy's negative record in this area is read not only as a clinical problem, but as the result of a deep-rooted cultural factor: inappropriate prescriptions, wrong expectations, incorrect use of drugs. It is on this terrain that the Turin initiative aims to make an impact, transforming simple slogans - 'wash your hands', 'don't throw drugs down the sink', 'don't take antibiotics at the first sneeze' - into internalised behaviour. If the experimentation yields measurable results, Antibiotic Cures could become a national best practice: a model capable of combining governance, science and civic participation to protect an increasingly fragile common good