Preliminary investigation of the influences on antimicrobial resistance

Antibiotic resistance is an important threat to human health, as well as to livestock health and welfare. This has become evident in the last few years with the increased occurrence of resistant infections within humans such as MRSA, C. difficile and E. coli. This paper reports on progress investigating the availability of antibiotic usage and resistance data and what can be determined in relation to the resistance problem from these data and their links to environmental conditions.

Urinary Tract Infections (UTIs) are common in the community and widely treated with antibiotics. Patients with UTI are at higher risk of developing E. coli bacteraemia, which can cause severe complications and death. There are three main antibiotics which are used to treat UTIs, namely Nitrofurantoin, Trimethoprim, and Cefalexin, with a further three including Amoxicillin, Ciprofloxacin and Co-amoxiclav. Our work will focus on this selection of six antibiotics, initially using data for Scotland and England GP prescriptions from 2015-2016 and 2014-2016 respectively.

The broad aims of the study include determining whether antibiotic use in humans is associated with antimicrobial resistance, and what patterns of antibiotic use or resistance exist in the wider community. Statistical tools used include data visualisation and spatio-temporal smoothing methods in order to produce a series of maps showing the underlying distributions of prescriptions and other factors.