The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has released a new interim report that measures antimicrobial resistance in Salmonella isolated from raw retail meat and poultry collected through the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS). The 2014-2015 Retail Meat Interim Report contains data from January 2014 – June 2015. It focuses only on Salmonella, a major pathogen of concern in foodborne disease outbreaks. Information includes serotype distribution, prevalence by food source and state, selected resistance patterns, and a list of all the identified antimicrobial resistance genes. To provide data in a timelier manner, the FDA intends to issue retail meat interim reports twice per year. In this report FDA also includes, for the first time, whole-genome sequencing data for Salmonella as a new component of routine NARMS surveillance practices and has placed all the isolate-level data on its website.
NARMS was established in 1996 as a partnership between the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to track antibiotic resistance in foodborne bacteria for drugs that are considered important in human medicine, including whether they are multidrug resistant (resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics). NARMS is critically important for monitoring trends in antimicrobial resistance among foodborne bacteria collected from humans, retail meats and food animals. In particular, it assists the FDA in making data-driven decisions on the approval of safe and effective antimicrobial drugs for animals.
The retail meat arm of the NARMS program collects samples of grocery store chicken, ground turkey, ground beef and pork chops, and tests for non-typhoidal Salmonella, Campylobacter, Escherichia coli and Enterococcus, to determine whether such bacteria are resistant to various antibiotics used in human and veterinary medicine. Enterococcus and most E. coli are not considered major foodborne pathogens but are included because they are helpful in understanding how resistance occurs and spreads.
Consumers can help protect themselves from foodborne bacteria, including antibiotic-resistant bacteria, by following four basic food safety tips: clean, separate, cook, chill. Learn more at http://www.foodsafety.gov/keep/basics/.
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