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.
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Last year I stumbled across this wonderful initiative by PlantLife, a charity dedicated to the conservation of wild plants, called the Road Verge Campaign. With half a million kilometres of road verges in the UK, this is one of the largest semi-natural habitats, one that the campaign aims to preserve. Not only road verges contain precious habitat for wild flowers, pollinators, small mammals and other wildlife, but are a potential corridor to connect other habitats, such woodland and meadows. As I became aware of the campaign, my local landowner (Beeswax by Sir James Dyson) started to cut the road verges around our house almost every two weeks. I should add that this is public land, but it is cut for road safety even if we have some of the quietest roads in the county (and country) as we live in an unclassified country lane. Moreover, rather than cut within 2 metres of the road, which are the least important for pollinators, they were cut extensively. Together with our neighbours, we wrote to the business manager who was sympathetic but, despite our efforts, the cuts continued. Possibly this was simply due to a lack of communication with the staff on the ground riding the mowers. Thankfully this year I have only seen the mowers once. Today, on a glorious sunny morning, I decided to take some pictures of my local walk, for 'future reference' as it were. If we all look after our 'local patch' be it garden, allotment, roundabout or road verge, we will make a difference for our dwindling wildlife. 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
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