Ahead of World Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Awareness Week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (USDA-APHIS) has announced eight awards totaling nearly $5 million to maintain, expand, and utilize previously developed AMR dashboard tools.

The awards will help advance scientific knowledge around AMR through partnerships with Cornell University, Iowa State University, the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA), Texas Tech University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Washington.

All AMR dashboards developed with this funding are required to include data protections. Once created, APHIS will use the dashboards to monitor trends in AMR patterns, detect emerging resistance profiles, and better understand relationships between antimicrobial use, animal health management practices, and AMR.

These public-private partnerships will improve access to information on AMR in domesticated animals, including livestock, poultry, and companion animals. They will focus on:

• Securely tracking the emergence and spread of antimicrobial-resistant microbes in domesticated animals
• Building an understanding of dynamics and frequencies of resistance emergence in microbial populations
• Developing a communication, coordination, and collaboration strategy for AMR dashboard tools.

USDA also recently highlighted trends from its most recent National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) report, a national public health surveillance system in which USDA, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and state and local public health departments track changes in the antimicrobial susceptibility of select foodborne pathogens isolated from clinical patients, retail meats, food-producing animals, and animal-derived foods.