The report highlights antimicrobial resistance patterns in bacteria isolated from humans, retail meats, and animals at slaughter. Specifically, the report focuses on major foodborne bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics that are considered important to human medicine, and on multi-drug-resistant organisms (described as resistant to three or more classes of antibiotics).

Overall resistance continues to remain low for most human infections and there have been measurable improvements in resistance levels in some important areas, the report said.

The prevalence of Salmonella in both retail chicken meat (9.1 per cent) and retail ground turkey (5.5 per cent) was at its lowest level since retail meat testing began in 2002. The prevalence of Campylobacter in retail chicken meat samples has gradually declined over time to 33 per cent, the lowest level since testing began.

Approximately 80 per cent of human Salmonella isolates are not resistant to any of the tested antibiotics. This has remained relatively stable over the past ten years. Resistance for three critically-important drugs in human non-typhoidal Salmonella isolates remained below 3 per cent.

While a majority of the observations in the 2014 NARMS Integrated Report show desirable trends, there are a few findings of potential concern.

These included rising levels of multi-drug-resistant Salmonella on turkey over the last ten years, and high levels of one type of drug-resistant Campylobacter.

Further Reading

You can view the full report by clicking here.