Tackling AMR at the interface of food production and public health in Low and Middle Income Countries

Project Team: Alex Hughes (Geography, Newcastle University), Emma Roe (Geography, University of Southampton), Neil Wrigley (Geography, University of Southampton), Bill Keevil (Microbiology, University of Southampton), Myron Christodoulides (Medicine, University of Southampton), Shari Daya (Geography, University of Cape Town) and Alister Munthali (Centre for Social Research, University of Malawi)

Project Partners: Tim Leighton and NAMRIP and Laurence Moore, MRC Social & Public Health Services Unit, University of Glasgow

The research will address the urgent need for Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) to confront the problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) by identifying critical control points in the food system, their implications for public health, and the strategies and organisations with greatest potential to tackle the challenges successfully. There is a need to improve understanding not only of AMR flows through food production-consumption chains, but also of how influential actors in the food system can become integral to national and international strategies for tackling AMR by connecting developments within and beyond the healthcare setting. The longer-term research aims to assess the current AMR challenge posed to human health through food supply chains in LMICs. It will specifically evaluate, and intervene in, two particular critical control points in the food production-consumption chain-environmental reservoirs of AMR and antibiotic stewardship.

It will also engage with and contribute to developments in national-level AMR strategy in LMICs, with a particular emphasis on bringing strategy for tackling AMR in food systems into wider policy developments on addressing AMR in human healthcare.  In order to illustrate the potential of these research aims, this development stage project involves scoping research and a workshop focusing on one part of one region of the interconnected global economy-Southern Africa.  Within that region, this development phase work will focus on South Africa (an Upper Middle Income Country on the DAC list) and Malawi (a Least Developed Country).

To date, NAMRIP has supplied funding to complete a pilot study in the second half of 2017, and currently funds for a fuller study are being sought.