Anti-microbial Use in Animals: How to Assess the Trade-offs

Antimicrobials are widely used in preventive and curative medicine in animals. Benefits from curative use are clear – it allows sick animals to be healthy with a gain in human welfare. The case for preventive use of antimicrobials is less clear cut with debates on the value of antimicrobials as growth promoters in the intensive livestock industries. The possible benefits from the use of antimicrobials need to be balanced against their cost and the increased risk of emergence of resistance due to their use in animals. The study examines the importance of animals in society and how the role and management of animals is changing including the use of antimicrobials. It proposes an economic framework to assess the trade-offs of anti-microbial use and examines the current level of data collection and analysis of these trade-offs. An exploratory review identifies a number of weaknesses. Rarely are we consistent in the frameworks applied to the economic assessment anti-microbial use in animals, which may well be due to gaps in data or the prejudices of the analysts. There is a need for more careful data collection that would allow information on (i) which species and production systems antimicrobials are used in, (ii) what active substance of antimicrobials and the application method and (iii) what dosage rates. The species need to include companion animals as well as the farmed animals as it is still not known how important direct versus indirect spread of resistance to humans is. In addition, research is needed on pricing antimicrobials used in animals to ensure that prices reflect production and marketing costs, the fixed costs of anti-microbial development and the externalities of resistance emergence. Overall, much work is needed to provide greater guidance to policy, and such work should be informed by rigorous data collection and analysis systems

Sources of antibiotic resistance: zoonotic, human, environment

Antibiotic resistance is a global problem that must be managed under the One Health perspective. Retrospectively, it is assumed that microbial populations able to cope with compounds with antimicrobial activity and susceptible bacteria lived in equilibrium for a thousand years. This situation would change in the middle 1940s of the twentieth century when one of the most important revolutions of modern medicine started - the use of a natural antimicrobial compound, the penicillin, to treat infectious bacterial diseases. Over the years, the massive use of antibiotics in human and animal medicine, as well as in animal production for both growth promotion and infection prophylaxis/metaphylaxis, accelerated and shaped one of the most successful evolutionary case studies. As a result of an impressive combination of genome and community dynamics, bacteria with acquired antibiotic resistance are nowadays widespread across different environmental compartments (water, soil, wildlife) as well as in the human food chain (poultry, livestock, aquaculture, produce). Hence, the evolutionary success of these bacteria turned to represent a major threat to the human health. This review discusses some of the drivers and paths of antibiotic resistance dissemination across zoonotic, human, and environmental sources.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Boosting OMD for Almost Free Authentication of Associated Data

We propose pure OMD (p-OMD) as a new variant of the Offset Merkle-Damgård (OMD) authenticated encryption scheme. Our new scheme inherits all desirable security features of OMD while having a more compact structure and providing higher efficiency. The original OMD scheme, as submitted to the CAESAR competition, couples a single pass of a variant of the Merkle-Damgård (MD) iteration with the counter-based XOR MAC algorithm to provide privacy and authenticity. Our improved p-OMD scheme dispenses with the XOR MAC algorithm and is purely based on the MD iteration; hence, the name ``pure'' OMD. To process a message of $\ell$ blocks and associated data of $a$ blocks, OMD needs $\ell+a+2$ calls to the compression function while p-OMD only requires max{$\ell, a$}+$2$ calls. Therefore, for a typical case where $\ell \geq a$, p-OMD makes just $\ell+2$ calls to the compression function; that is, associated data is processed almost freely compared to OMD. We prove the security of p-OMD under the same standard assumption (pseudo-randomness of the compression function) as made in OMD; moreover, the security bound for p-OMD is the same as that of OMD, showing that the modifications made to boost the performance are without any loss of security

Time-scaled evolutionary analysis of the transmission and antibiotic resistance dynamics of Staphylococcus aureus CC398

Staphylococcus aureus clonal complex 398 (CC398) is associated with disease in humans and livestock, and its origins and transmission have generated considerable interest. We performed a time-scaled phylogenetic analysis of CC398, including sequenced isolates from the United Kingdom (Scotland), along with publicly available genomes. Using state-of-the-art methods for mapping traits onto phylogenies, we quantified transitions between host species to identify sink and source populations for CC398 and employed a novel approach to investigate the gain and loss of antibiotic resistance in CC398 over time. We identified distinct human- and livestock-associated CC398 clades and observed multiple transmissions of CC398 from livestock to humans and between countries, lending quantitative support to previous reports. Of note, we identified a subclade within the livestock-associated clade comprised of isolates from hospital environments and newborn babies, suggesting that livestock-associated CC398 is capable of onward transmission in hospitals. In addition, our analysis revealed significant differences in the dynamics of resistance to methicillin and tetracycline related to contrasting historical patterns of antibiotic usage between the livestock industry and human medicine. We also identified significant differences in patterns of gain and loss of different tetracycline resistance determinants, which we ascribe to epistatic interactions between the resistance genes and/or differences in the modes of inheritance of the resistance determinants

Mediazione e negoziazione assistita nelle controversie con la p.a.: modelli a confronto (pubblicato 12.1.2021)

Il contributo affronta il tema della possibile estensione della mediazione al campo del diritto e del processo amministrativo, analizzando alcuni profili problematici della tematica sul piano teorico ed applicativo. Si propone quale alternativa a tale strumento di ADR, non esente da rilevanti criticità sul piano anche pratico, l’impiego del più duttile istituto della negoziazione assistita, la cui disciplina positiva (risalente al 2014) potrebbe essere agevolmente adattata alle controversie tra privato e pubblica amministrazione. Si esaminano i tratti salienti della normativa vigente e si avanzano alcuni suggerimenti de iure condendo per l’introduzione della negoziazione assistita amministrativa (NAA) quale precipuo ed innovativo strumento di deflazione delle liti innanzi ai Tribunali Amministrativi Regional