Antimicrobial Resistance: Surveillance to avoid outbreaks

  I love hive, and I love when people converge on the same topics I am currently thinking about. Last week I read an wonderful article from the user @apineda in here. He brought up this awesome topic about the importance of better conscientization in antibiotics usage, in many countries they are sold like water and people take them as water. As a consequence, we have more bacterial strains that are resistant to current treatments. On top of that, I joined a new job at the beginning of the year involved in a big antimicrobial resistance (AMR) project. This project is concerned to gather data from different sources of AMR samples, such as sold food, environment, farms and wastewater.

  Scientific community together with governments are concerned about super bacteria that are difficult to fight against with drugs called antibiotics. And antibiotics are used everywhere, the user @amestyj cited once in a while in his posts about a more sustainable way of using organic methods to grow pasture or even in animal feeding and how it is good to avoid antibiotics in livestock. So farmers (including fish farmers) use antibiotics to avoid production loss but somehow they contribute to a selection of these super bacteria. We can also cite that food production companies also use antibiotics to increase the longevity of their products. In conclusion, if we find a bacterial strain with multiple resistance genes in multiple samples from different sources, it could be a red flag of something that is coming or even found in some hospitalizations already.

  The bacteria that is found in most of the food origin contamination is *Salmonella enterica*. In a big study in the US, the authors found that 25% of the isolates sequenced between 2015 in patients had a certain type of resistance to one or multiple antibiotics, including Quinolone and Ceftriaxone from a total of almost 4.5 thousand samples. In addition, 21% of the retail meat isolates had resistance to at least 3 different antibiotics (M’ikanatha et al, 2021). Another work found this type of bacteria also with these AMR genes in 93% of the total isolates in raw chicken meat between 2014 and 2019 in the UK. (Davies et al, 2019). I was talking with a colleague one of these days and she said that eating raw chicken, like "chicken sashimi" was a thing, and that is one of the most common cases of hospitalization due to Salmonella infections.

pxabay: https://pixabay.com/photos/chicken-chicken-breast-fillet-3212144/

Conclusions

  Different from many countries, Canada, US and most of Europe control the selling of antibiotics for regular people in pharmacies. I think that it still has some bad usage, due to some healthcare professionals' preference to prescribe antibiotics to patients before having a real infection, but still the main origin of antimicrobial infections nowadays it could be associated since in the beginning of food production in farms, or in the industrialization and commercialization. So like many people around here said, maybe using organic products can help fight AMR in addition to better surveillance, and more data about isolates collected in all steps in food production.