What are we to do about antibiotic resistance? Last week, another government report repeated stark warnings about the crisis, and offered some suggestions to improve the situation. The UK report, prepared by a panel chaired by the economist Jim O'Neill, naturally focused on financial incentives, including US$1-billion prizes for pharmaceutical firms that develop new antimicrobial drugs.

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Love to gorge on barbecued chicken? Be careful as eating food cooked on grills cleaned with wire-bristle brushes can prove to be dangerous to health, warns new research.

Agriculture and food production are responsible for a substantial proportion of greenhouse gas emissions. An emission based food tax has been proposed as one option to reduce food related emissions. This study introduces a method to measure the impacts of emission based food taxes at a household level which involves the use of data augmentation to account for the fact that the data record purchases and not consumption. The method is applied to determine the distributional and nutritional impacts of an emission based food tax across socio-economic classes in the UK.

Excessive energy intake has been identified as a major contributor to the global obesity epidemic. However, it is not clear whether dietary patterns varying in their composition of food groups contribute. This study aims to determine whether differences in per capita availability of the major food groups could explain differences in global obesity prevalence.

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It is estimated that 72% of emerging zoonotic disease events originate from wildlife. Many of these diseases pose serious risks to human health, as demonstrated by the 2014 Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak in West Africa. Trade that brings wildlife into close proximity with humans and domestic animals provides an interface for pathogen transmission.

The potential negative impact for human health of veterinary use of antimicrobials in prophylaxis, metaphylaxis and growth promotion in animal husbandry was first established in the 1960s and 1970s. Determination of the molecular structure of antimicrobial resistance plasmids at that time explained the ability of antimicrobial resistance genes to disseminate among bacterial populations and elucidated the reasons for the negative effects of antimicrobials used in food animals for human health. In this issue of Environmental Microbiology, Liu et al.

We use data on food import violations from the FDA Operational and Administrative System for Import Support (OASIS) to address rising concerns associated with imported food, quantify import risks by product and by country of origin, and explore the usefulness of OASIS data for risk assessment. In particular, we assess whether there are significant trends in violations, whether import violations can be used to quantify risks by country and by product, and how import risks depend on economic factors of the country of origin.

The current outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) centered in West Africa is the largest in history, with nearly ten times more individuals contracting the disease than all previous outbreaks combined. The details of human-to-human and zoonotic ebolavirus transmission have justifiably received the largest share of research attention, and much information exists on these topics.

Antimicrobial resistance profiles and presence of resistance determinants and integrons were evaluated in Salmonellaenterica strains from Brazilian poultry. The analysis of 203 isolates showed that those from the poultry environment (88 isolates) were significantly more resistant to antimicrobials than isolates from other sources, particularly those isolated from poultry by-product meal (106 isolates). Thirty-seven isolates were resistant to at least three antimicrobial classes.

In October, 2015, 22 scientists from ten countries met at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, to evaluate the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat. The Working Group assessed more than 800 epidemiological studies that investigated the association of cancer with consumption of red meat or processed meat in many countries, from several continents, with diverse ethnicities and diets.

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