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Brendon Nafziger, DOTmed News Associate Editor | July 14, 2011
"The idea is not to come up with huge amounts of money, but restructure the way we pay for [antibiotics], so firms are compensated for doing the things we want them to do," Hollis said.
The animal problem

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But even fixing the drug pipeline doesn't eliminate one potentially major source of resistance: the animals bred to be food on your plate.
In fact, the majority of antibiotic use in America goes toward treating animals. According to material provided by the World HAI Forum, nearly 80 percent of antibiotic use in the U.S. is with animals. In 2009 alone, nearly 29 million pounds, or 13,000 tons, of antibiotics went to livestock, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
And some scientists worry this antimicrobial glut for farm animals is creating reservoirs for resistant organisms.
At the meeting, Prof. Jan Kluytmans, a microbiologist with the Amphia Hospital in Breda, and a professor of medical microbiology at VUmc Medical University in Amsterdam, documented the rapid spread of multi-drug resistant organisms in livestock, since Dutch researchers first found MRSA in pigs and calves in 2005.
"Now nearly all farms are positive for containing MRSA, and people who work with the animals and who live on the farm are very easily colonized," he said in a video interview with HAI forum.
Another resistance mechanism -- the production of Extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) -- is also increasing among animals. Those retail chickens found infected with drug-resistant E.coli had the ESBL-producing variety. In fact, Kluytmans says a recent survey at Dutch stores found 85 percent of chicken meat had ESBL-making organisms.
"For healthy people, there's not a real risk, they don't get infections easily," he said. "In hospital, it's totally different," he noted, pointing out that patients could get infected by the strains they carried.
"At present, we only see things getting worse, and solutions will be to restrict the use of antibiotics in animal food production," he said. But as that could lead to higher meat prices, it's something consumers would have to be willing, of course, to swallow.
Watch for the special infection-control feature in the August issue of DOTmed Business News.Back to HCB News