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Less than 10 years ago, at the height of the commodities boom, Brazil was all but assured a place as an oil world powerhouse following the discovery of oil in its subsalt basins. Much faith has been put in Brazil delivering the barrels needed to keep the medium-term oil market in reasonable balance. Whether it is the IEA, EIA, OPEC, major oil companies, or indeed the Brazilian government, all projected the country's oil production to increase substantially in the coming years. This optimism was brought to the forefront of the global oil and gas industries by the 2007/2008 discovery of the vast pre-salt basins, specifically the Tupi field. This ranks alongside Kashagan as one of the largest and most significant oil discoveries of the past few decades and the biggest in the Americas since the Cantarell field in Mexico in 1976. However, as has often been the case in recent history for the oil markets, a number of project delays and cost overruns have since taken the shine off the initial optimism, and has also kept Brazil from playing a bigger role in the non-OPEC supply picture. So what has slowed the progress in the Brazilian oil sector? This paper argues that Brazil's upstream sector faces a number of key challenges, including: regulatory barriers; a massive financial burden, consisting of the world's largest corporate expenditure programme and increasingly funded by debt; high production costs and high decline rates; caps on domestic fuel prices, which have adversely affected Petrobras' earnings; and waning interest from major international oil companies (IOCs) in co-financing projects. The country's deep-sea bonanza has become less alluring, whilst oil companies have also been adapting to a changing energy landscape, altered by a focus on capital discipline, shale in the US, and the emergence of other frontier energy sources, such as in deepwater Africa or oil sands in Canada.

Antimicrobial resistance poses a growing threat to public health and the provision of health care. Its surveillance should provide up-to-date and relevant information to monitor the appropriateness of therapy guidelines, antibiotic formulary, antibiotic stewardship programmes, public health interventions, infection control policies, and antimicrobial development. In Europe, although the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network provides annual reports on monitored resistant bacteria, national surveillance efforts are still fragmented and heterogeneous, and have substantial structural problems and issues with laboratory data. Most incidence and prevalence data cannot be linked with relevant epidemiological, clinical, or outcome data. Genetic typing, to establish whether trends of antimicrobial resistance are caused by spread of resistant strains or by transfer of resistance determinants among different strains and species, is not routinely done. Furthermore, laboratory-based surveillance using only clinical samples is not likely to be useful as an early warning system for emerging pathogens and resistance mechanisms. Insufficient coordination of surveillance systems of human antimicrobial resistance with animal surveillance systems is even more concerning. Because results from food surveillance are considered commercially sensitive, they are rarely released publicly by regulators. Inaccurate or incomplete surveillance data delay a translational approach to the threat of antimicrobial resistance and inhibit the identification of relevant target microorganisms and populations for research and the revitalisation of dormant drug-discovery programmes. High-quality, comprehensive, and real-time surveillance data are essential to reduce the burden of antimicrobial resistance. Improvement of national antimicrobial resistance surveillance systems and better alignment between human and veterinary surveillance systems in Europe must become a scientific and political priority, coordinated with international ...