Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a big problem with a crappy marketing plan. It’s been termed a “silent pandemic,” and it has huge health and financial impacts that are only going to get worse if we don’t act. Unfortunately, even though we’ve been battling this issue for decades, the average person doesn’t know about it, or
New WHO Medically Important Antimicrobial List
Hot off the press (at long last), here is the latest version of the World Health Organization’s Medically Important Antimicrobial List.
What is the WHO Medically Important Antimicrobial List?
It’s a document that categorizes all the classes of antimicrobials that are used in people and/or animals by how important they are to human medicine
New CLSI Breakpoints For Veterinary Medicine: How to Interpret Results While Labs Are Updating Their Protocols, Part 3: Pseudomonas
In the first two parts of this series, I explained a lot of the changes that have been made to the CLSI veterinary antimicrobial susceptibility testing guidelines, specifically those related to staphylococci and Enterobacterales (which includes E. coli and friends). There’s less to say about Pseudomonas, but these changes will impact our
New CLSI Breakpoints For Veterinary Medicine: How to Interpret Results While Labs Are Updating Their Protocols, Part 2: Staph, Enterobacterales and Fluoroquinolones in Dogs
The Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI) has updated their main veterinary testing standards document: VET01SEd7E Performance Standards for Antimicrobial Disk and Dilution Susceptibility Tests for Bacteria Isolated From Animals, 7th Edition. Check out earlier posts for an overview of the relevant changes, and more specifics about the standards for staphylococci and chloramphenicol
New CLSI Breakpoints For Veterinary Medicine: How to Interpret Results While Labs Are Updating Their Protocols, Part 1: Staph and Chloramphenicol
Yesterday, I wrote a post about a new version of CLSI’s Performance Standards for Antimicrobial Disk and Dilution Susceptibility Tests for Bacteria Isolated From Animals. There are some major changes in this update, and I sympathize with the diagnostic labs that now have to update their testing and reporting. It won’t happen overnight, because
Updated CLSI Veterinary Susceptibility Testing Guidance: What Veterinarians Need to Know (Spoiler… This One Has Lots of Relevant Changes!)
Diagnostic testing is a cornerstone of veterinary medicine that helps us optimize patient care, but there’s a lot of science behind it that people often forget. We collect a sample, send it off for testing and magically get the results, often without putting a lot of thought into what happens at the lab. Labs (should)
Let Doxycycline Off the Leash: No Need to Avoid It in Young Growing Animals
I spend a lot of time talking about antimicrobial misconceptions and dogmas. They are a big issue, because they often lead to unnecessary or excessive duration of antimicrobial use, use of more invasive routes of administration (e.g. intravenous over oral), or use of higher-tier antimicrobials than necessary.
I’ll just address one of these misconceptions today:
Antimicrobials Used For Growth Promotion: WOAH Call For Countries to Do What They Said They’d Do
The World Organization for Animal Health Health (WOAH, formerly the OIE) has issues a call to countries to live up to their commitments to phase out the use of antimicrobials for growth promotion in animals. This is low-hanging fruit in terms of antimicrobial stewardship that you’d think would have been addressed by now, but
US Antimicrobial Sales For Use in Animals, 2022
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’s 2022 Summary Report on Antimicrobials Sold or Distributed for Use in Food Producing Animals has been released. It includes some good signs and some bad signs in terms of curbing antimicrobial use (AMU) in the US, but it’s clear we still have a lot of room to improve.
Mystery Dog Respiratory Disease (Or Not) and Antibiotics (Or Not)
As concerns about canine infectious respiratory disease in the US have taken up most of my time lately, let’s merge that issue with what I had hoped to be the focus of the week: World Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Awareness Week.
Despite lots of media attention and associated fear, we’re still not sure what’s going