NARMS in Maryland: surveilling levels and investigating drivers of antimicrobial resistance in retail foods

SUMMARY: The development and use of antimicrobial agents marked a turning point in medicine, veterinary practice, and industrial food production. Yet these transformative gains risk being eroded or even lost entirely due to the emergence and spread of antimicrobial resistance across microbial populations. The National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) is a long-standing strategic partnership that was established to surveil and respond to antimicrobial resistance in human infections (led by CDC), foods (led by FDA), and animals (led by USDA). Maryland was one of the 5 states that founded the retail meat surveillance system at FDA in 2002, and has participated continuously in the program ever since, performing 35,464 microbiological tests on specific target retail meats, and isolating 12,907 bacterial strains. During the past ~5 years alone, Maryland has collected and tested 1,687 retail meats from designated catchment areas, performed 5,646 microbiological tests, isolated 2,322 strains of bacteria, and sequenced and publicly shared 803 bacterial genomes. Maryland has also invested efforts into streamlining its bacterial isolation and sequencing processes, and began a systematic analysis of its considerable historical data to identify current and historic retail drivers of antimicrobial resistance. The present proposal seeks to capitalize on these advances by continuing both high-volume antimicrobial resistance surveillance, as well as thoughtful and timely data analysis, in close partnership with the FDA.