News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – A recent analysis of ground pork in grocery stores in five states showed that 4% of the samples contained enterococci with high-level resistance to gentamicin, an antibiotic used to treat enterococcal infections in humans. In addition, most Enterococcus faecium isolates were resistant to quinupristin-dalfopristin (Synercid), a streptogramin antibiotic used to treat infections caused by vancomycin-resistant E faecium.

(CIDRAP News) – A study from Taiwan shows a rapid increase in fluoroquinolone resistance in Salmonella enterica serotype choleraesuis in humans over the past 2 years and suggests that the resistant strain spread from pigs. The findings prompted the researchers to urge a ban on fluoroquinoline use in food animals.

(CIDRAP News) – Nearly a year and a half after the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first proposed to stop the use of enrofloxacin (Baytril, a fluoroquinolone antibiotic) in poultry because of safety concerns, the agency says it plans to hold a public hearing on the proposal. The date of the hearing will be set at a prehearing conference on April 8.

A multidrug-resistant strain of Salmonella that emerged as a common pathogen in the mid-1990s was present in the United States as early as 1985, according to a report from the CDC.

A ruling by the Food and Drug Administration on whether to stop the use of enrofloxacin in poultry because of concern about antimicrobial resistance is more than a year away, according to a hearing schedule laid out by an FDA official.

In a Danish study, patients who had infections with a common drug-resistant type of Salmonella enterica were more than twice as likely to die within 2 years as patients infected with drug-susceptible variants of the same strain.

(CIDRAP News) – A committee of experts convened by the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics (APUA) says that antibiotics should not be used in agriculture except to treat sick animals and protect healthy animals threatened by disease in the herd or flock.

The most common cause of foodborne Salmonella infections grew increasingly resistant to the quinolone nalidixic acid between 1995 and 2000, according to a study from Denmark.

(CIDRAP News) – Data on recent salmonellosis outbreaks indicate that drug-resistant strains of Salmonella enterica serotype Newport are becoming increasingly common in dairy cattle and are causing a growing share of infections in humans, according to a foodborne disease expert with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).