NIAMRRE, the National Institute of Antimicrobial Resistance Research and Education, gave the member spotlight to Animal and Veterinary Sciences Associate Professor John Barlow for November 2023. He gave a presentation entitled, AMR on Small-to-Medium Sized Dairy Farms in Vermont: Is it Relevant? during their November webinar.
An excerpt from Barlow’s member spotlight is below.
Dr. Barlow’s excellent talk provided insights to the work conducted in his laboratory, which is aimed at helping to support organic dairy farmers in the state, as well as artisanal cheese-making farmers. His group’s work uses a One Health approach and includes food safety, milk quality, and mastitis on farms making farmstead cheese and artisan cheese, antibiotic resistance on dairy farms, Staphylococcus infections in dairy cattle, mastitis ecology and epidemiology, and alternative mastitis therapies.
One of the key highlights from the work that Dr. Barlow presented included findings that human-adapted strains of S. aureus had higher frequency of antibiotic resistance compared to cattle-adapted strains from Vermont dairy farms engaged in making farmstead cheese. In this work, evidence of spill-over of resistant S. aureus between cows and humans, and in both directions, was observed.