18 / 2024-10-10 12:08:39

The Globalization-Antimicrobial Resistance Nexus: Lessons from Livestock Trade

The livestock industry has undergone significant transformation during the last century attributed to the expansion of intensive farming and global trade. Nevertheless, the precise implications of these agricultural applications on microbial evolution at the microscopic level remain inadequately exploited, thereby potentially threatening food safety.

Salmonella is a severe pathogenic bacterium capable of contaminating food, water, or food processing facilities, thereby entering the food supply chain, and causing potentially fatal foodborne illnesses. Pigs and poultry are major sources of Salmonella infections. Do intensive farming practices and global trade contribute to the prevalence of Salmonella illness? Moreover, does an intricate relationship exist between macroscopic agricultural activities and microbial dynamics? In this post, the intriguing question is addressed.

We investigated the host-specificity of Salmonella based on over 300,000 accessible genomes in public database. Utilizing the core genome multi-locus sequence typing (cgMLST) scheme, we observed frequent inter-continental transmission of genetically almost identical strains in these swine and poultry-enriched populations, which cannot be explained solely by natural causes. When compared with global trade data obtained from the Harvard database, we found surprisingly high correlations between the transmission patterns of these populations and the international trade of frozen pork and chicken, which likely served as a vector for long-range transportation of these bacteria.

This study showcased the unexpected influences of human activities on the evolution and spread of microbes. This study also highlighted the importance of international collaboration under the “One Health” strategy in the surveillance and control of the spread of foodborne pathogens.