Blog

One of the key strategic objectives of the World Health Organisation’s global antimicrobial resistance (AMR) action plan is to improve public awareness and understanding of this issue. Very few AMR awareness campaigns have targeted the animal production sector, particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) where rural communities can be geographically difficult to access via traditional face-to-face community engagement methods. Aquaculture is a major food production industry in Bangladesh and across Asia, an area which poses a significant risk to global AMR dissemination. A pilot study sought to investigate the potential for digital communication materials to rapidly and effectively communicate AMR messages to rural aquaculture farmers in Bangladesh.

In Ethiopia, improved access to veterinary drugs has led to their increasing use in food-producing animals. The animal health extension service that ought to educate and advise community members about integrated animal health management strategies is limited. Community members, including livestock keepers, have limited access to animal health education, advisory and training services. Livestock keepers often buy veterinary drugs from roadside markets and self-treat their animals without considering the consequences of administering these drugs themselves. Most of these small-scale farmers have limited knowledge of the link between misuse of veterinary drugs and the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), which results in treatment failures in animals and humans. To address this knowledge and information gap, the CGIAR Research Program on Livestock in Ethiopia tested a community-based animal health extension approach using ‘community conversations’ to engage community members and local service providers in collaborative learning and joint action processes to increase AMR awareness. 

October to December 2019 issue provides an overview of activities taking place by the CGIAR AMR Hub led by ILRI that has been developed with our partners for this quarter

A four-day antimicrobial resistance (AMR) workshop at WorldFish in Penang, Malaysia aimed to inform the development of an AMR database platform for interventions, named AMRIntervene, and to validate factors that contribute to interventions that have successfully or less successfully addressed AMR. In addition, the workshop aimed to create a visual model of the inter-related factors influencing AMR in the south east Asian food system context that will be used to explore how promising interventions, if implemented could impact AMR and other parts of the system in the future.