Heiman Wertheim

Background

About Heiman Wertheim

Heiman Wertheim is a professor in clinical microbiology and heads the clinical microbiology department at Radboud University Medical Center and is chair of the Radboud Center of Infectious Diseases (RCI, Heiman is president of the Netherlands Society of Medical Microbiology Furthermore he is treasurer of the International Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy and of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA). For these societies he is developing an directed therapies global antibiotics guideline in collaboration with prof Souha Kanj (Lebanon). Until 2015, Heiman was director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit (OUCRU, in Hanoi, Vietnam. He coordinated laboratory capacity strengthening and conducted research in Southeast Asia. He worked on a broad range of infectious disease issues, varying from zoonoses (e.g. Streptococcus suis, avian influenza) to hospital acquired infections. One of his main interests is antibiotic resistance in both resource rich and resource constrained settings and does this through a multidisciplinary approach: health systems, policy development, behavior, surveillance, prevention, genomics, and clinical trials. He supervised activities for the Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership (GARP) in Vietnam, which did a situation analysis on antibiotic use and resistance. He received funding to set up a national AMR reference laboratory and to improve the governance structure of AMR in Vietnam. He demonstrated that C-reactive protein point of care testing can bring down antibiotic use safely in primary health stations in Vietnam. Heiman is the PI of the ABACUS project that studies in 3 Asian countries and 3 African countries community antibiotic use. ABACUS project studies also how the appearance of antibiotics influences use (https://abacus-project.org). In the Netherlands he is active in the Gelderland Antibiotica Resistentie en Infectiepreventie Netwerk (GAIN) and member of the National Health Council (Gezondheidsraad).