Monitoring of Antimicrobial Resistance in Food Animal Production

1. To elucidate and provide descriptive data, such as prevalence and/or trends, including antimicrobial susceptibilities, and molecular subtyping for foodborne pathogens in food animals through the animal sampling arm of the NARMs program. The project will (1) continue to improve the standardization and quality control of methods used; 2) where appropriate and necessary re-evaluate and/or develop improved sampling strategies to answer priority questions for NARMS in food animal production that are consistent with the overall NARMS goals and objectives as described on the NARMS web site; and 3) develop a program that monitors for the development transmission of antimicrobial resistance in swine including, where possible, antimicrobial use information. 2. Be a national resource of enteric bacterial isolates and resistance data for food animals from NARMS and US-VetNet. This resource will facilitate the identification and characterization of antimicrobial resistance as it emerges. Further, it will facilitate the identification and implementation of any new research needs by the complementary research project within this Unit. It is expected that the project will be highly responsive to requests for data from FDA-CVM, USDA-FSIS, and other stakeholders.