Data from: Modelling the impact of curtailing antibiotic usage in food animals on antibiotic resistance in humans

Consumption of antibiotics in food animals is increasing worldwide and is
approaching, if not already surpassing, the volume consumed by humans. It
is often suggested that reducing the volume of antibiotics consumed by
food animals could have public health benefits. Although this notion is
widely regarded as intuitively obvious there is a lack of robust,
quantitative evidence to either support or contradict the suggestion. As a
first step towards addressing this knowledge gap, we develop a simple
mathematical model for exploring the generic relationship between
antibiotic consumption by food animals and levels of resistant bacterial
infections in humans. We investigate the impact of restricting antibiotic
consumption by animals and identify which model parameters most strongly
determine that impact. Our results suggest that, for a wide range of
scenarios, curtailing the volume of antibiotics consumed by food animals
has, as a stand-alone measure, little impact on the level of resistance in
humans. We also find that reducing the rate of transmission of resistance
from animals to humans may be more effective than an equivalent reduction
in the consumption of antibiotics in food animals. Moreover, the response
to any intervention is strongly determined by the rate of transmission
from humans to animals, an aspect which is rarely considered.