Modelling the impact of curtailing antibiotic usage in food animals on antibiotic resistance in humans.

ABSTRACT: Consumption of antibiotics in food animals is increasing worldwide and is approaching, if not already surpassing, the volume consumed by humans. It is often suggested that reducing the volume of antibiotics consumed by food animals could have public health benefits. Although this notion is widely regarded as intuitively obvious there is a lack of robust, quantitative evidence to either support or contradict the suggestion. As a first step towards addressing this knowledge gap, we develop a simple mathematical model for exploring the generic relationship between antibiotic consumption by food animals and levels of resistant bacterial infections in humans. We investigate the impact of restricting antibiotic consumption by animals and identify which model parameters most strongly determine th

SUBMITTER: van Bunnik BAD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5414261 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature