Metrics for Public-Health Perspective Surveillance of Bacterial Antibiotic Resistance

Olga Tosas Auguet of the University of Oxford and collaborators at the Modernising Medical Microbiology Consortium, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, Oxford Genomics Centre and London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the United Kingdom, and Oxford Tropical Network Overseas Programs in southeast Asia and Africa, will develop a new approach for the large-scale surveillance of bacterial antibiotic resistance in low-income settings. Current methods mainly involve the collection and analysis of individual clinical samples, which requires diagnostic equipment often unavailable in developing countries. They will pool together ~300 samples of rectal swabs and stools taken from biobanks, and analyze each pool by shotgun sequencing to identify the abundance of bacterial species and antibiotic resistance genes. They will use these data to calculate resistance potential and to determine how accurately this metric approximates the numbers of infections in a population that are resistant to a specific antibiotic.