ORCID Profile
0000-0002-3765-7482
Current Organisation
Ruralis Institutt for rural- og regionalforskning
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Publisher: Routledge
Date: 25-11-2016
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 27-08-2020
Abstract: The environmental dimension of antimicrobial resistance has expanded the scope and scale of policy concern and research interest in antimicrobial resistance to include not just clinical and agricultural settings but a wide variety of environmental spaces and places. This article examines the ways in which environmental scientists researching the environmental dimension of antimicrobial resistance produce culturally specific forms of environmental imaginaries as a means of stabilising complex, uneven and open-ended environmental, human and microbial relations. These imaginaries work to structure the gaze of scientific enquiry towards particular places, objects and scales, and justify particular decisions and practices over others. Drawing on the imaginaries literature from Science and Technology Studies and Cultural Geography, our analysis examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of environmental imaginaries. In doing so, we identify four imaginaries, the environmental hotspot, the pristine environment, the fluid environment and the environmental reservoir. These distinct but interconnected imaginaries produce a constellation of ideas and assumptions that shape scientific practices, the ways and places in which the environmental dimension of antimicrobial resistance becomes known, and the types of interventions and actions that are made apprehensible as a result. In opening these imaginaries to interrogation at this relatively formative stage, we aim to identify ways in which social science contributions can complement and enhance the ways in which the figure of ‘the environment’ is brought to bear on responses to antimicrobial resistance.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 05-02-2019
DOI: 10.1057/S41599-019-0220-2
Abstract: This paper interrogates the claim that antimicrobial-resistant infections are rarely encountered in animal agriculture. This has been widely reiterated by a range of academic, policy and industry stakeholders in the UK. Further support comes from the UK's Animal and Plant Health Agency’s (APHA) passive clinical surveillance regime, which relies on veterinarians to submit s les for analysis and similarly reports low levels of resistance amongst key animal pathogens. Building on social science work on knowledge-practices of animal health and disease, and insights from emerging literature on non-knowledge or ‘agnotology’, we investigate the conditions shaping what is known about antimicrobial-resistant infections on farms. In so doing, we find that how on-farm knowledge is produced about resistant infection is concurrently related to domains of imperceptibility or what cannot be known in the context of current practices. The paper discusses the findings of ethnographic research undertaken on an East Midlands dairy farm that highlight the following specific findings. First, farmers and veterinarians, when observing instances of treatment failure, draw on an experiential repertoire that effaces resistances and instead foregrounds the complexities of host-pathogen interaction, or failings in human behaviour, over pathogen-antibiotic interactions. Second, the knowledge-practices of both farmers and veterinarians, although adept at identifying and diagnosing infectious disease are not equipped to make resistance perceptible. Third, this imperceptibility has implications for antibiotic use practices. Most notably, veterinarians anticipate resistance when making antibiotic choices. However, because of the absence of farm level knowledge of resistance this anticipatory logic is informed through the prevalence of resistance ‘at large’. The analysis has implications for the existing passive resistance surveillance regime operating in the dairy sector, which relies on veterinarians and farmers voluntarily submitting s les for diagnostic and susceptibility testing. In effect this entrenches farm level imperceptibility and effacement by farmers and veterinarians within the national dairy surveillance regime. However, we also highlight opportunities for providing farm specific knowledge of resistance through the anticipatory logic of veterinarians and a more active regime of surveillance.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 06-2016
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2020
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2022
DOI: 10.1016/J.ENVINT.2022.107516
Abstract: Waste from dairy production is one of the largest sources of contamination from antimicrobial resistant bacteria (ARB) and genes (ARGs) in many parts of the world. However, studies to date do not provide necessary evidence to inform antimicrobial resistance (AMR) countermeasures. We undertook a detailed, interdisciplinary, longitudinal analysis of dairy slurry waste. The slurry contained a population of ARB and ARGs, with resistances to current, historical and never-used on-farm antibiotics resistances were associated with Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria and mobile elements (ISEcp1, Tn916, Tn21-family transposons). Modelling and experimental work suggested that these populations are in dynamic equilibrium, with microbial death balanced by fresh input. Consequently, storing slurry without further waste input for at least 60 days was predicted to reduce ARB spread onto land, with > 99 % reduction in cephalosporin resistant Escherichia coli. The model also indicated that for farms with low antibiotic use, further reductions are unlikely to reduce AMR further. We conclude that the slurry tank is a critical point for measurement and control of AMR, and that actions to limit the spread of AMR from dairy waste should combine responsible antibiotic use, including low total quantity, avoidance of human critical antibiotics, and choosing antibiotics with shorter half-lives, coupled with appropriate slurry storage.
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Richard Helliwell.