Last Friday, 9th February, I travelled to Nottingham to visit my colleagues, Sonia Gomez, Belen Sanz (ANLIS, Argentina) Helen West, Dov Stekel, Anastasia Kadochnikova (University of Nottingham, UK), Paula Avello (University of Leeds, UK) and Lisa Collins (University of Surrey, UK), to talk about our research on antimicrobial resistance in chicken litter. This was the first visit (and last sadly!) for our Argentine collaborators, Dr Sonia Gomes and her PhD student, Belen Sanz. We discussed our upcoming results, and it was great to celebrate the first output from this UKRI/BBSRC/CONICET funded project, Dr Paula Avello's article in Health and Policy Planning, titled "National action plans on antimicrobial resistance in Latin America: an analysis via a governance framework". Here with co-authors we used qualitative text analysis to build a picture of the national policy plans for antimicrobial action in Latin America. We assessed strengths (e.g. coordination and partecipation), and opportunities for further improvements - for example, incorporating the environment in future iterations of the plans.
0 Comments
I have two main research streams: the evolutionary and ecological effects of climate change on species reproductive traits and antimicrobial resistance. I haven't talked about my current project on antimicrobial resistance in a long time. In 2018, I attended a workshop on a UK-Argentina joint funding programme in Buenos Aires. At the workshop, I met Helen West and the rest, is history. Helen and I, together with Andrew Singer (CEH Wallingford), Dov Stekel (Dov and Helen at the University of Nottingham) and Lisa Collins (University of Leeds) put together a bid to study antimicrobial resistance in poultry in Argentina. Our project was funded in 2019, but then was delayed by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. To cut a long story short, project work slowly resumed over the course of 2021, and now we are beginning to see the early fruits of our work. In 2021, Lisa and I, interviewed for a postdoc to be employed on the project and were delighted to appoint Dr Paula Avello Fernandez. Paula is a mathematician and is originally from Chile, which is an incredible asset for our project. With the work in the chicken sheds delayed in Argentina, and therefore temporarily missing precious modelling data, Paula threw herself into the part of the project that I lead: policy. Having reviewed key antimicrobial resistance policy documents from all of South America, Paula is almost ready to submit her first manuscript from this project. With COVID-lockdowns and teaching commitments, I had not been able to meet Paula in person. We finally remedied to that this month, when we met over coffee and had a lovely in-person chat! How does antimicrobial resistance transfer from livestock to the environment? Which interventions to poultry litter could improve management practices in Argentina and other low and middle-income countries? What does the scientific evidence show?
If you are you interested in these questions, and have a keen interest in shaping and influencing policy around antimicrobial resistance, do get in touch with Professor Lisa Collins and I - we have a postdoc position available based at the University of Leeds but collaborating me, at the University of Lincoln. The work will integrate data from a wider project into a systems model to identify key predictors for the emergence and transmission of antimicrobial resistance bacteria within the broiler agri-system. You will get to work with stakeholders in Argentina and the UK, work as part of a large team of researchers across multiple disciplines both in the UK and overseas - It's going to be exciting! |
AuthorGraziella Iossa Archives
August 2023
Categories
All
|