Associated organisationsGeorge Washington University · University of OxfordEurope PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding£2.7M
PeriodMay 2018 — Apr 2022
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
California has just banned the routine use of antibiotics in livestock, and researchers are racing to measure whether that policy actually cuts the number of drug-resistant infections in people. The problem is stark: antibiotics fed to healthy animals to promote growth or prevent disease breed resistant bacteria that can jump into the human food chain. Until now, no US state had tried a full-scale ban, so no one knows how well such a policy works in practice. This project treats California’s 2018 law as a natural experiment, comparing bacterial resistance rates in retail meat and human infections before and after the ban took effect. If the research succeeds, it will provide the first hard evidence on whether restricting agricultural antibiotic use reduces resistant infections in the community. That evidence could shape national policy: other states and the federal government currently lack data to justify similar bans. The findings will also help veterinarians and public-health officials decide where to focus surveillance efforts, potentially slowing the spread of resistant *E. coli*, *Campylobacter*, and *Salmonella*—pathogens that together cause hundreds of thousands of infections each year in the UK alone.
View original technical description
On January 1, 2018, California enacted Senate Bill 27 (SB27), first-of-its-kind and potentially precedent-setting legislation, which will require a veterinarian’s prescription for use of antimicrobial drugs and ban non-therapeutic antimicrobial uses for routine disease prevention and growth promotion in livestock. To assess the effectiveness of this important legislation at reducing antimicrobial resistant bacterial infections in humans, we propose the following specific aims: Aim 1. Quantify the effect of SB27 on E. coli, Campylobacter and Salmonella resistance rates from retail meat. Aim 2. Estimate the proportion of human Campylobacter, Salmonella, and extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli infections caused by strains of food-animal origin in California. Aim 3. Characterize the effect of SB27 on the antimicrobial susceptibility of Campylobacter, Salmonella, and extraintestinal E. coli infections caused by strains of food-animal origin in California. Implementation of SB27 provides a unique natural experiment to assess the effectiveness of restrictive agricultural antimicrobial-use policies at reducing antimicrobial-resistant human infections. The proposed research will have a positive impact by prospectively measuring the effect of this policy on the antimicrobial susceptibility of E. coli (an important colonizing opportunistic pathogen) and Campylobacter and Salmonella (two frank foodborne pathogens) and thereby maximizing the information gained from this singular opportunity
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