The Rising Tide of Antimicrobial Resistance in Aquaculture: Sources, Sinks and Solutions
By J. Watts, H. Schreier, Lauma Lanska, Michelle S. Hale. Marine Drugs, 2017
627 citations recorded by the source corpus.
As the human population increases there is an increasing reliance on aquaculture to supply a safe, reliable, and economic supply of food. Although food production is essential for a healthy population, an increasing threat to global human health is antimicrobial resistance. Extensive antibiotic resistant strains are now being detected; the spread of these strains could greatly reduce medical treatment options available and increase deaths from previously curable infections. Antibiotic resistance is widespread due in part to clinical overuse and misuse; however, the natural processes of horizontal gene transfer and mutation events that allow genetic exchange within microbial populations have been ongoing since ancient times. By their nature, aquaculture systems contain high numbers of diverse bacteria, which exist in combination with the current and past use of antibiotics, probiotics, prebiotics, and other treatment regimens—singularly or in combination. These systems have been designated as “genetic hotspots” for gene transfer. As our reliance on aquaculture grows, it is essential that we identify the sources and sinks of antimicrobial resistance, and monitor and analyse the transfer of antimicrobial resistance between the microbial community, the environment, and the farmed product, in order to better understand the implications to human and environmental health.
Subfields: Immunology, Molecular Biology, Pollution
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e93072a864c2079d024ef5ae879398884750c19b
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Citations in the corpus
- Impacts of marine and freshwater aquaculture on wildlife: a global meta-analysis (2018, positive): “It should be noted that the development of new vaccines has allowed fish farmers in some areas (e.g. salmonid farms in Norway and Scotland) to largely cease antimicrobial use despite rapid expansion of the industry, but use remains high in other regions (Watts et al. 2017).”
- Antibiotic resistome in the livestock and aquaculture industries: Status and solutions (2020, background): “Large amounts of selective agents and fecal contaminations containing ARGs/ ARBs from aquaculture enter our water bodies, stimulating the bacterial mutation, recombination and horizontal gene transfer, thereby increasing the level of ARGs in natural aquatic environments and risk of spreading ARGs fr”
- Antimicrobial resistance in aquaculture: a crisis for concern (2020, background): “Since most of the recommended antimicrobials such as oxytetracycline and amoxicillin used in aquaculture are equally important for humans, there exists a significant link between terrestrial and aquatic resistomes (Watts et al. 2017).”