Be part of World AMR Awareness Week 2025 (18-24 November). 

 

In September 2025, as part of an exciting awareness raising campaign the Fleming Initiative invited members of the public to submit a photograph and their story highlighting how antibiotics helped them or their family.

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The campaign builds on the success of the Fleming Initiative’s every 11 seconds billboard campaign in Times Square, New York, during the 2024 United Nations’ High-Level meeting on AMR, and our interactive pop-up installation on the concourse of Paddington Station, London, during World AMR Awareness Week 2024.

 

Working with creative agency Gorilla Gorilla, the Fleming Initiative team developed a bold and visually striking campaign using the 783.5m2 Piccadilly Lights billboard. The campaign featured an illusion of the billboard glitching and freezing, before being taken over by moving personal stories of the life-enhancing benefits of antibiotics paired with powerful messaging about the very real threat that AMR poses.

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Drone footage (no sound) of the Thank you antibiotics @ Piccadilly Lights, 18 Nov 2025

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The Fleming Initiative has become a prominent voice in the call for greater citizen awareness of AMR. Slowing AMR requires a shift in global public understanding of its causes and the potential solutions as a pre-requisite for collective behaviour change. This campaign is a call to action and, ultimately, a message of hope, inviting everyone to come together to ‘fix the system’ and protect antibiotics.   

 

 Submissions to the campaign were made across one of four categories:

• enabling safe childbirth

• enabling safe surgery

• making cancer treatment possible

• enabling recovery from a serious infection.

 

​We were delighted to receive almost 300 submissions, almost a third of which came from outside the UK, representing 30 countries from all over the world – from Australia to Zimbabwe.

 

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Original video (no sound) of the Thank you antibiotics @ Piccadilly Lights

 

Professor Alison Holmes, Director of the Fleming Initiative, said: “Every one of us has an individual connection to antibiotics and a personal debt of gratitude for their importance in treating infections or preventing them when needed. We have depended on them being effective in our own lives, and in the life history of our families. Whether they helped beat a serious infection, or enabled the safe delivery of a baby, or the safe treatment of cancer therapy, we have all depended on them. Members of the public have helped us shine a light on the urgent need to ensure that antibiotics remain effective, by celebrating their own experiences and gratitude. By sharing stories, we can raise awareness of this urgent health crisis and be a part of the global movement to tackle AMR.”

 

Dame Sally Davies, the UK Special Envoy on AMR who was featured on the billboard, said: “I am delighted to support this innovative campaign. By offering the public a starring role at its very heart, I hope it will capture the public imagination and encourage people to learn about AMR and how individual behaviours and choices can be part of the solution.” 

 

Professor the Lord Ara Darzi, Executive Chair of the Fleming Initiative, said:

 

“Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest public health threats facing the global population, but it is one we can overcome together. 

 

“As a cancer surgeon, I have seen first-hand how vital antibiotics are: cancer patients face ten times the risk of sepsis, and without antibiotics, chemotherapy and surgery simply cannot be delivered safely. We cannot take them for granted.

 

“That is why the Fleming Initiative is bringing together science, policy and – most importantly – the public to find innovative solutions to this crisis. By sharing our experiences, this campaign will help spark a global movement to keep antibiotics working and safeguard the future of healthcare for generations to come.”

 

While submissions for inclusion on the billboard are now closed, people can still submit a photo and story to say “Thank you antibiotics” via the survey page here and these may be used for future Fleming Centre Exhibitions or campaigns. ​

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