Antimicrobial Resistance and Ecology: A Dialog Yet to Begin

Excerpt

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is deemed as one of the major public health concerns of the twenty-first century (WHO 2014), yet knowledge concerning AMR bacteria circulating in wildlife is still in its infancy largely because efforts to establish central collection, evaluation and communication of antimicrobial susceptibility have been focused on human and veterinary data (Wellington et al. 2013; Dias et al. 2015, 2019; Torres et al. 2017). We fully agree with White and Hughes (2019) who, in their recent paper in EcoHealth, strongly encourage a holistic and multidisciplinary One Health approach to tackle the complex and multifaceted problem of AMR. As these authors highlighted, wildlife species can act as sentinel species for AMR surveillance and will help to describe and understand the dynamics and mechanisms for resistance in the environment. We concur with the authors that we have been underestimating the tremendous importance of the animal compartment in contributing to AMR dissemination. While One Health networks in Africa, Asia and Europe have been increasing, the animal health axis is still mostly focused on livestock, without including wildlife (Khan et al. 2018; Lhermie et al. 2019). We are now at an exciting turning point where One Health could lead to a paradigm shift that will set the foundation to a more integrated and multidisciplinary approach for addressing some of the major current challenges in infectious disease, namely AMR. …