One reason antimicrobial-drug resistance is of concern is its economic impact on physicians, patients, health-care administrators, pharmaceutical producers, and the public. Measurement of cost and economic impact of programs to minimize antimicrobial-drug resistance is imprecise and incomplete. Studies to describe and evaluate the problem will have to employ new methods and be of large scale to...

Salmonella enterica bacteria have become increasingly resistant to antimicrobial agents, partly as a result of genes carried on integrons. Clonal expansion and horizontal gene transfer may contribute to the spread of antimicrobial drug-resistance integrons in these organisms. We investigated this resistance and integron carriage among 90 isolates with the ACSSuT phenotype (resistance to ampicil...

Michigan has had an ongoing outbreak of endemic Mycobacterium bovis which has been recognized within and sustained by its free-ranging white-tailed deer population since 1994. Worldwide, organisms within the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex have exhibited the ability to develop resistance to antimicrobial agents, resulting in both the multidrug-resistant (MDR) and extensively drug-resistant (...

Escherichia coli sequence type 131 (ST131), an emerging disseminated public health threat, causes multidrug-resistant extraintestinal infections. Among 579 diverse E. coli ST131 isolates from 1967-2009, we compared pulsotypes (>94% similar XbaI pulsed-field gel electrophoresis profiles) by collection year, geographic origin, source, and antimicrobial drug-resistance traits. Of 170 pulsotypes, 6...

Emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance is a major concern for the dairy industry worldwide. Objectives were to determine: (1) phenotypic and genotypic prevalence of drug-specific resistance for 25 species of non-aureus staphylococci, and (2) associations between presence of resistance determinants and antimicrobial resistance. Broth micro-dilution was used to determine resistance prof...

Antimicrobial resistance has become one of the most serious public health concerns worldwide. Although circumstances may vary by region or country, it is clear that some Asian countries are epicenters of resistance, having seen rapid increases in the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance of major bacterial pathogens. In these locations, however, the public health infrastructure to combat this ...

We investigated the association between prescribing antimicrobial agents and antimicrobial resistance of Streptococcus pneumoniae among children with acute otitis media in southern Israel. During a 6-year period, all prescriptions of a sample of approximately 20% of Jewish and Bedouin children <5 years of age were recorded and all pneumococcal isolates from middle ear fluid were collected. Alth...

The evolution of antibiotic resistance carries a fitness cost, expressed in terms of reduced competitive ability in the absence of antibiotics. This cost plays a key role in the dynamics of resistance by generating selection against resistance when bacteria encounter an antibiotic-free environment. Previous work has shown that the cost of resistance is highly variable, but the underlying causes...