Sydney Rentsch, a junior from Connecticut College, worked with Dr. JP Schmidt to examine the relationship between antibiotic use and resistance in US livestock.
Abstract: The potential for livestock to spread antibiotic resistant pathogens to human populations is a cause for concern. This research focused on finding trends in data on US livestock antibiotic resistance, US livestock inventory and US livestock antibiotic consumption. Data was compiled from CDC, USDA and FDA reports and publicly available datasets. Data was analyzed in R and generalized additive models (GAMs) were used to test for increasing resistance as a function of time. We found that the tetracycline class of antibiotics had consistently high resistance over time. The antibiotic class lincosamides, had a sharp increase in resistance which was positively associated with the data from turkeys and chickens. Analyzes also found that poultry had the highest burden of antibiotic resistant pathogens. These results may lead future studies focused on antibiotic resistance in poultry and provide framework for future data analysis.