In some parts of the world, acts as simple as composting can effectively lessen the spread of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, one WSU researcher said.

Douglass Call, a professor and researcher in the Paul G. Allen School of Global Animal Health, specializes in the study of antibiotic resistance, particularly from an ecological standpoint.

According to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), 23,000 people die every year from antibiotic resistant infections in the United States. Call approaches this issue, but addresses it in the developing world.

He is currently in Tanzania studying the impact antibiotic resistance has there, and is starting more work in Kenya.

Part of his research involves studying the connectivity between livestock and people, which allows diseases to spread.

“The healthier you keep people’s livestock has a huge impact on the health of the family,” Call said. “Healthy animals lead to healthy people.”

He said the way people live in America is separate from what they eat. However, he said this is not the case in all parts of the world.

“People are so closely connected to their food and water supplies,” Call said about people of Tanzania. “It’s a daily question for them.”

To understand this relationship, one must understand human behavior, he said. This is part of his work in Tanzania as Call will work with a team and a translator to interview Tanzanian families. So far, he and his team have interviewed about 200 households.

He described the population he worked with as nice, generous and very curious. He said they often get a reverse interview where the people question them.

During the interviews, he inquires about their recent health and tries to understand how they make decisions regarding health. He asks whether they prefer taking antibiotics or using indigenous healing methods when they are ill.

Antibiotic resistance is by no means a problem contained to places where animals and humans live in close quarters with each other, he said. The problems can spread quickly through food and people.

People give antibiotics to their farm animals for several reasons, he said. One, called a prophylactic, is giving an animal antibiotic in anticipation of disease. Another reason is a therapeutic use to treat disease. A third and more controversial reason is for use as a growth promoter. Drugs in the food supply seem to cause animals to grow better, at least on a poorly run farm, Call said.

When an animal is given antibiotics, the animal excretes them into the soil, which then becomes part of the problem as pathogens in the soil can form resistances.

“The contamination of water and soil with active metabolites of antibiotics excreted in the urine of treated individuals, humans and livestock creates a previously unrecognized reservoir for resistance,” Guy Palmer, director of the Paul G. Allen Center, said.

Call said unnecessary use of antibiotics can amplify the resistant population, but there are many other factors involved. For this reason, he works with people in fields as diverse as computer science and anthropology.

Regulating antibiotic use is a difficult problem across nations, as demand for dietary protein is increasing, especially in low-income countries. The best way to control the issue, Call said, is to work on reducing the demand for these antibiotics.

Increased vaccinations, safety control measures in farms and naturally produced antimicrobial proteins can help with this issue, he said. He is working with these ideas as well as probiotics – good bacteria that can recolonize and have a cleansing effect.

“As long as there’s no space for a pathogen to go, you can out-compete them,” he said.

Probiotics is a difficult field, however, because results are not consistent across subjects, however they do not have the problem of resistance. Some drugs are harder to become resistant to than others, Call said.

Disease resistance can be slowed down, but cannot be stopped indefinitely, according to a CDC report on antibiotic and antimicrobial resistance. The report states that the natural evolutionary process will require new tests to track resistance and the creation of new antibiotics.

There are currently 20 products in phase 1-3 of clinical trials to keep up with resistance trends, Call said.