According to a new study published today in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, a California regulation prohibiting the use of antibiotics in animals raised for food is linked to a decline in one type of antibiotic-resistant infection among people living in the state.
The findings imply that restrictions on the use of antibiotics in cattle may have a considerable effect on human health.
In addition to Kara Rudolph, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University, the study’s principal investigator was Joan Casey, an assistant professor in the UW Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS).
For the first time ever in the United States, California Senate Bill 27 (SB27) outlawed routine preventive antibiotic usage in food animal production as well as any antibiotic use without a veterinarian’s prescription in 2018.Casey and her coworkers discovered that the strategy was linked to a 7% decrease in resistance to extended-spectrum cephalosporins, a kind of antibiotics used in cattle, among Escherichia coli bacteria isolated from urine in humans with urinary tract infections.
The study includes coauthors Sara Tartof and Hung Fu Tseng of Kaiser Permanente, Meghan Davis and Keeve Nachman of Johns Hopkins University, and others from George Washington University, Becton Dickinson, the University of Arizona, Sutter Health and the University of California San Francisco.
“Reducing antimicrobial resistance is a critical factor in improving community health,” said Tartof, an epidemiologist with Kaiser Permanente Department of Research & Evaluation in Southern California. “This study shows that changes in clinical practice alone will not be sufficient to reduce this threat. We need to strengthen our efforts with larger public policy initiatives to reduce antimicrobial use beyond the hospital setting as well.”
Researchers have previously demonstrated links between the widespread use of antibiotics on livestock and antimicrobial-resistant infections in people, which cause nearly 3 million infections and 35,000 deaths each year.
