The World Health Organization considers antimicrobial resistance (AMR) one of the top global public health threats. This year’s theme for the World Antibiotic Awareness Week (WAAW) is “Educate. Advocate. Act Now.”

Since 1996, the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS), a U.S. national public health surveillance system, has been collecting, analyzing, and sharing AMR data and information. NARMS partner agencies include the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and other federal agencies and state and local public health departments. For nearly three decades, NARMS partners have worked together to track regional and national changes in AMR. This is accomplished through surveillance sampling and the integration of foodborne bacterial AMR data from samples collected from ill people (CDC), retail meats (FDA), and food animals and animal-derived foods (FSIS). The phenotypic and genotypic data from these surveillance programs are publicly available on NARMS partner agency websites and via the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). FDA hosts the integrated NARMS Now web portal, which provides user-friendly and on-demand interactive access to AMR data in humans, animals, and food products.

FSIS generates AMR and/or whole-genome sequencing (WGS) data for NARMS from meat and poultry product sample results (Salmonella, Campylobacter) and from cecal (intestinal) contents sample results (Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli, and Enterococcus). Unlike the food product samples, a single cecal sample can be analyzed for up to four types of bacteria and can have multiple bacterial isolates/results per sample. The world class FSIS laboratory system analyzes over 90,000 food products, cecal and other samples annually, and retrieves more than 14,000 isolates. All the isolates are subject to antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) and/or WGS. Over the last decade, high-throughput laboratories at FSIS have contributed over 129,000 AST results to NARMS and over 157,000 WGS to NARMS and NCBI. This wealth of FSIS AMR data can be accessed through various publicly accessible sources, including the following:

• FSIS cecal isolate data - Provides AMR data from intestinal bacteria prior to slaughter/processing interventions.
• FSIS isolate level food products data - Provides AMR data from animal-derived foods at the establishment level (prior to product distribution).
• FSIS Microbiological Testing data - Provides quarterly updates on AMR in food products and cecal samples.
• FDA NARMS Now - Provides an integrated AMR snapshot of human, animal, and food products.
• NCBI Pathogen Detection - Provides a variety of bacterial genomic sequence data, including antibiotic susceptibility and resistance gene information.

The FSIS NARMS program has contributed important data/information on the presence of AMR in food-producing animals and animal-derived foods for over a decade and is uniquely poised to help tackle the complex problem of AMR by supporting this year’s WAAW theme “Educate. Advocate. Act Now.”