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.

全球范围内食用动物的抗生素消耗量持续攀升，即便尚未超过人类的抗生素消费量，也已逼近这一数值。学界普遍认为，减少食用动物的抗生素使用量或可带来公共健康收益，但这一观点尚未得到严谨的定量证据支持，既无法证实也无法证伪。为填补这一认知空白，我们首先构建了一个简化的数学模型，用于探究食用动物的抗生素消耗量与人类耐药菌感染水平之间的一般关系。我们分析了限制食用动物抗生素使用量所产生的影响，并确定了对该影响起最强决定作用的模型参数。研究结果显示，在诸多场景下，仅通过减少食用动物的抗生素消耗量这一单一干预手段，对人类体内的耐药性水平几乎不会产生显著影响。我们还发现，相较于同等幅度削减食用动物的抗生素消耗量，降低耐药性从动物向人类的传播速率或许更为有效。此外，任何干预措施的效果都强烈取决于耐药性从人类向动物的传播速率——这一维度此前极少被纳入考量范畴。