Abstract

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics continues to pose a serious threat to human and animal health. Given the considerable spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the distribution of resistance and the factors that affect its evolution, dissemination and persistence, we argue that antibiotic resistance must be viewed as an ecological problem. A fundamental difficulty in assessing the causal relationship between antibiotic use and resistance is the confounding influence of geography: the co-localization of resistant bacterial species with antibiotic use does not necessarily imply causation and could represent the presence of environmental conditions and factors that have independently contributed to the occurrence of resistance. Here, we show how landscape ecology, which links the biotic and abiotic factors of an ecosystem, might help to untangle the complexity of antibiotic resistance and improve the interpretation of ecological studies.

Author affiliations

1. Randall S. Singer and George Maldonado are at the Division of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455 USA.
   Randall S. Singer is also at the following: the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota 55108 USA; the Instituto de Medicina Preventiva Veterinaria, Facultad de Ciencias Veterinarias, Universidad Austral de Chile, Valdivia, Chile; and the Departamento de Microbiología, Facultad de Ciencias Biológicas, Universidad de Concepción, Concepción, Chile.
2. Michael P. Ward is at the Department of Veterinary Integrative Biosciences, Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas 77843–4458 USA.

Correspondence to: Randall S. Singer¹ Email: singe024@umn.edu

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