The current global overuse and misuse of antimicrobials requires an urgent international response. According to the 2014 World Health Organization (WHO) Antimicrobial Resistance Global Report on Surveillance, deaths per year due to antibiotic resistance are reported as high as 23,000 in the United States, 25,000 in the European Union, 38,000 in Thailand and 58,000 in India [1]. The WHO develope...

Debate exists about whether agricultural versus medical antibiotic use drives increasing antibiotic resistance (AR) across nature. Both sectors have been inconsistent at antibiotic stewardship, but it is unclear which sector has most influenced acquired AR on broad scales. Using qPCR and soils archived since 1923 at Askov Experimental Station in Denmark, we quantified four broad-spectrum β-lact...

Antibiotic use is a major driver for the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistance. Antimicrobial stewardship programmes aim to improve antibiotic prescribing with the objectives of optimizing clinical outcomes while at the same time minimizing unintended consequences such as adverse effects and the selection of antibiotic resistance. In 2013, a five-year national strategy for tackling anti...

Misuse and overuse of antibiotic therapy is a frequent cause of resident harm in nursing facilities. As a result, newly released policy and regulatory initiatives will require antibiotic stewardship programs (ASPs) in nursing facilities. Although implementing ASPs can be challenging, improving the quality of antibiotic prescribing is achievable in this setting. The authors review the determinan...

Antibiotics pose a great public health irony. Their existence and use have made possible the treatment of previously untreatable infections. But simultaneously, rampant antibiotic overuse has promoted the development of antibiotic resistance and new untreatable, highly resistant infections. To address this growing threat, The National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria esta...

BACKGROUND Expanding antimicrobial resistance patterns in the face of stagnant growth in novel antibiotic production underscores the importance of antibiotic stewardship in which de-escalation remains an integral component. We measured the frequency of antibiotic de-escalation in a tertiary care medical center with an established antimicrobial stewardship program to provide a plausible benchmar...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate the development of pharmacist-led antimicrobial stewardship activities in English hospitals. METHODS Distribution of an electronic questionnaire to antimicrobial pharmacists or chief pharmacists in National Health Service hospitals in England. RESULTS Since a previous study, in 2005, overall numbers of specialist antimicrobial pharmacists, and their levels of experien...

BACKGROUND Despite reports advocating for integration of research into healthcare delivery, scant literature exists describing how this can be accomplished. Examples highlighting application of qualitative research methods embedded into a healthcare system are particularly needed. This article describes the process and value of embedding qualitative research as the second phase of an explanator...

BACKGROUND Restriction of antibiotic consumption to below predefined total use thresholds might remove the selection pressure that maintains antimicrobial resistance within populations. We assessed the effect of national antibiotic stewardship and infection prevention and control programmes on prevalence density of meticillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections across a region of ...

Antibiotic use is widely accepted as being responsible for the selection and maintenance of antibiotic resistance. It is less obvious, however, that it is also responsible for increasing transmissibility and pathogenicity of many multiresistant bacteria and may actually be increasing the number of hospital-acquired infections (HAIs). Antibiotic stewardship should be given much more emphasis in ...