How Can We Fight the Spread of Antibiotic Resistance?

Barry Kreiswirth, PhD, founding director, Public Health Research Institute Tuberculosis Center, professor of medicine at Rutgers University, explains how active surveillance can assist in the fight against antibiotic resistance.

Interview Transcript (slightly modified for readability)

“That’s the question [that] we really don’t know and I think [that] that’s the question that we and the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] and other people in public health really need to address. I think [that] what we can do is have active surveillance.

The good news is that, once something has been identified, we have the tools to at least track it; it’s just a matter of having the wherewithal to put the right teams together to do this. I think [that], given the concern of our publication as well as the recognition that mcr-1 is spreading among animal isolates, the CDC is clearly aware of this problem.

I think [that] now is the time to really start—through state laboratories as well as through big hospital laboratories that have experience in endemic areas—to do active surveillance [and] really ask: what is the extent of this problem?

[It's important that], when there are areas of the country that experience this first, they have the opportunity and the wherewithal to really try to control this so [that] it doesn’t spread elsewhere.”