Antibiotic resistance spreads from farms to people in China

RESISTANCE is spreading from the farm to the hospital. The first large-scale survey of resistance to colistin, a crucial antibiotic of last resort, has detected it in around 1 per cent of hospital patients in two large cities in China.

That’s surprising as in China colistin isn’t used in people. While it is a vital drug for treating infections resistant to other antibiotics in the US and UK, in China it is fed to livestock to promote their growth. This means the resistance gene must have spread from bacteria in livestock to bacteria in people.

This is the strongest evidence yet that the use of antibiotics on farms affects resistance in people. “We can now say unequivocally that feeding antibiotics to animals negatively affects humans,” says Tim Walsh at Cardiff University, UK, who worked on the study.

The colistin resistance gene was first discovered in China in 2015, and has since spread to other countries. The study also identified the first known case of the resistance gene being carried by the most globally widespread, disease-causing strain of the human gut bacterium Escherichia coli, called ST-131 (The Lancet, doi.org/bx3f).

On 1 April, China is set to make it illegal to use colistin as a growth promoter in livestock, and the drug will instead start being used to treat people. But some infections will already be able to resist it.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Antibiotic resistance spreads”