Drug resistance linked to antibiotic use and patient transfers in hospitals

 

Understanding the role of antibiotic use patterns and patient transfers in the emergence of drug-resistant microbes is essential to crafting effective prevention strategies.

 

Antimicrobial resistance is a growing global health threat, but preventing it takes smart choices at the local level. The current findings, provide insights on how antibiotic use patterns and patient transfers in hospitals drive the emergence of resistance, and suggest a new approach for tailoring prevention strategies to an individual hospital or ward.

 

To help hospitals assess the best strategies for preventing the emergence of resistance, Shapiro and her colleagues employed a technique typically used in ecology to study the effect of antibiotic use and patient transfers on infections. They developed a computer model based on a year's worth of data around seven species of infection-causing bacteria, including drug-resistant strains, in 357 hospital wards in France.

 

The scientists found that the use of the penicillin antibiotic, piperacillin-tazobactam, was the strongest predictor of the emergence of bacteria that are resistant to the standard treatments for life-threatening blood infections. If this is confirmed in further studies, the authors suggest that the strategy of using piperacillin-tazobactam instead of carbapenems to prevent antimicrobial resistance may need to be reconsidered.

 

In fact, the study showed that the effects of antibiotic prescription and patient transfer patterns on the emergence of drug resistance varied among different microbes and types of infections, suggesting that a more individualised approach to preventing resistance is necessary.

 

See:

 

Julie Teresa Shapiro, Gilles Leboucher, Anne-Florence Myard-Dury, et al Metapopulation ecology links antibiotic resistance, consumption, and patient transfers in a network of hospital wards. eLife, 2020; 9 DOI: 10.7554/eLife.54795

 

Posted by Dr. Tim Sandle, Pharmaceutical Microbiology Resources (http://www.pharmamicroresources.com/)