The One Health Initiative: Working Together to Fight Antibiotic Resistance

Lauri A. Hicks, DO, captain, US Public Health Service, director, Office of Antibiotic Stewardship, medical director, Get Smart: Know When Antibiotics Work, Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, explains how the fight against antibiotic resistance is part of the One Health initiative.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“Certainly, USDA is a leader in this area [and] we [can] also say that FDA is very engaged in improving how antibiotics are being used in animals. It’s really important for us to partner with them for a number of reasons. One [reason] is, we actually track antibiotic-resistance trends in infections that could be transmitted from animals to humans. Salmonella is one of the infections that we track as part of our programs here at CDC. So, it’s important for us to be communicating with these agencies so that they know where there may be antibiotic-resistance threats, increasing concerns for antibiotic resistance, that potentially represent transmission from animals to humans.

When we have seen studies looking at sales data, certainly the volume of antibiotics sold for animal health appears to be quite a bit higher than it does for humans. What I do think is important to remember is that we know that each time an individual uses an antibiotic, you or I use an antibiotic, my son uses an antibiotic, it makes it more likely that a subsequent infection that [my son] could acquire would be antibiotic-resistant. So, we cannot necessarily just think that, ‘Okay, if we solve the problem in animals, then we’ll solve the problem in humans.’ We must be thinking about this as a ‘One Health’ initiative.”