Antimicrobial resistance in humans, livestock and the wider environment
By Mark Woolhouse, Melissa J. Ward, Bram A. D. van Bunnik, J. Farrar. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2015
624 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in humans is inter-linked with AMR in other populations, especially farm animals, and in the wider environment. The relatively few bacterial species that cause disease in humans, and are the targets of antibiotic treatment, constitute a tiny subset of the overall diversity of bacteria that includes the gut microbiota and vast numbers in the soil. However, resistance can pass between these different populations; and homologous resistance genes have been found in pathogens, normal flora and soil bacteria. Farm animals are an important component of this complex system: they are exposed to enormous quantities of antibiotics (despite attempts at reduction) and act as another reservoir of resistance genes. Whole genome sequencing is revealing and beginning to quantify the two-way traffic of AMR bacteria between the farm and the clinic. Surveillance of bacterial disease, drug usage and resistance in livestock is still relatively poor, though improving, but achieving better antimicrobial stewardship on the farm is challenging: antibiotics are an integral part of industrial agriculture and there are very few alternatives. Human production and use of antibiotics either on the farm or in the clinic is but a recent addition to the natural and ancient process of antibiotic production and resistance evolution that occurs on a global scale in the soil. Viewed in this way, AMR is somewhat analogous to climate change, and that suggests that an intergovernmental panel, akin to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, could be an appropriate vehicle to actively address the problem.
Subfields: Molecular Biology, Molecular Medicine, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a97b78f74823a3a209a0cb78160b2dfd298c962e
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Citations in the corpus
- Review of Antimicrobial Resistance in the Environment and Its Relevance to Environmental Regulators (2016, background): “The degree to which this transmission from animals to humans, and vice-versa, is of great interest and has significant implications for public and animal health (Weir et al., 2012; Woolhouse et al., 2015; Klous et al., 2016).”
- Antibiotic Use in Agriculture and Its Consequential Resistance in Environmental Sources: Potential Public Health Implications (2018, background): “[205], antibiotic resistance in livestock farming can be looked at from four different viewpoints, i.”
- Antibiotic Pollution in the Environment: From Microbial Ecology to Public Policy (2019, background): “Antibiotics in AFOs are not only used to treat acute infections but also pre-emptively on the herd level and to promote growth [79,82], leading to intensive selection on microbiomes associated with farm animals and resulting in manure and wastewater contaminated with ARBs [83].”