Antibiotic Resistance in Isolates from Diseased and Healthy Livestock

Dear Colleagues,

In recent decades, the WHO has led a continuous campaign on raising awareness on antimicrobial resistance due to its increasing importance as a global health hazard and reaching the position of the top ten global public health threats facing mankind.

The key facts identified by WHO during surveillance on antimicrobial resistance and published in 2021 include: the urge for multi-actor engagement towards attaining the Sustainable Development Goals adopted by UN members in 2015; identification of mis- and overuse of antimicrobials, inadequate control methods to prevent spreading, the costs emerging in case of antimicrobial resistance as some of the causes for emergence, increase and further spread of antimicrobial resistance. The “post antibiotic era” definition used by WHO to depict the therapeutic crisis defines roughly the risks connected with infections, including nosocomial ones in people and animals.

The introduction, after their discovery, of the antibiotic / antimicrobial therapies in medical and veterinary practice helped eradicating, at least for a while, several the bacterial diseases in some areas of the world. During the “golden antibiotic era”, diseases such as tuberculosis, known for millennia, found their cure when streptomycin was discovered in 1944. Further, both human and veterinary medicine were revolutionized by antimicrobial therapy, and a spectacular decrease in infection rate and dramatic reduction of epidemics was recorded subsequently.  

Still, the inconsistent, abusive and excessive use of antibiotics resided over time in emergence of antimicrobial resistance not only in medicine but in veterinary medicine and environment as well. Antibiotics were used as a tool to prevent diseases in intensive farming, providing supplementary routes and mechanisms for antimicrobial resistance transfer to previously harmless bacteria.

Long disregarded, the “animal segment” including farmed animals but also wildlife, treated or not against diseases by use of antibiotics, proved to be one important link in the transfer of antimicrobial resistance. Thus, the foundation for a One Health perspective on antibiotic resistance also became an urge to investigate, define, interpret, control and prevent this continuously expanding phenomenon.

As a response to this initiative, this Special Issue aims at updating research results on spectra of antibiotic resistance in bacterial isolates from animals under therapies or healthy ones, the potential origin and or induction mechanisms of these, factors influencing their spread, further consequences on cohabitants or further contacts, both human and animal ones, potential means of prevention and their efficacy, control strategies and their impact in preserving “One Health” and “”One Welfare”.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Farming technologies and connected factors contributing to antibiotic resistance;
• Impact of various antibiotics on antibiotic resistance gene transfer in treated and healthy animals;
• Potential role of antibiotics’ overuse on the environment niche and its pollution with resistance plasmids;
• Prevention and control of antibiotic resistance in animals and its contribution to maintaining One Health;
• Antibiotic resistance transfer between animals species and/or within habitats and many more.

Submissions of perspectives, opinions, commentaries, and data reports are also welcome.

Dr. Marina Spinu
Guest Editor

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