# Building the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance network in veterinary medicine (EARS-Vet)

Rodolphe Mader, Peter Damborg, Jean-Philippe Amat, Björn Bengtsson, Clémence Bourély, Els M Broens, Luca Busani, Paloma Crespo-Robledo, Maria-Eleni Filippitzi, William Fitzgerald, et al.

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Rodolphe Mader, Peter Damborg, Jean-Philippe Amat, Björn Bengtsson, Clémence Bourély, et al. Building the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance network in veterinary medicine (EARS-Vet). Eurosurveillance, 2021, 26 (4), 10.2807/1560-7917.es.2021.26.4.2001359. hal-04042908

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# Building the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance network in veterinary medicine (EARS-Vet)

Rodolphe Mader¹, Peter Damborg², Jean-Philippe Amat³, Björn Bengtsson⁴, Clémence Bourély⁵, Els M Broens⁶, Luca Busani⁷, Paloma Crespo-Robledo⁸, Maria-Eleni Filippitzi⁹, William Fitzgerald¹⁰, Heike Kaspar¹¹, Cristina Muñoz Madero⁸, Madelaine Norström¹², Suvi Nykäsenoja¹³, Karl Pedersen⁴, Lucie Pokludova¹⁴, Anne Margrete Urdahl¹², Alkiviadis Vatopoulos¹⁵, Christos Zafeiridis¹⁶, Jean-Yves Madec¹, on behalf of EU-JAMRAI¹⁷

1. University of Lyon, French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES), Laboratory of Lyon, Antibiotic Resistance and Bacterial Virulence Unit, 31 avenue Tony Garnier, 69007 Lyon, France

2. University of Copenhagen, Department of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Stigbøjlen 4, 1870 Frederiksberg C, Denmark

3. University of Lyon, French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health and Safety (ANSES), Laboratory of Lyon, Epidemiology and Support to Surveillance Unit, 31 avenue Tony Garnier, 69007 Lyon, France

4. National Veterinary Institute, Department of Animal Health and Antimicrobial Strategies, Ulls väg 2B, SE-751 89 Uppsala, Sweden

5. Direction générale de l'alimentation, Bureau de la santé animale, 75015, Paris, France

6. Utrecht University, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Department of Biomolecular Health Sciences, Yalelaan 1, 3584 CL, Utrecht, the Netherlands

7. Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Department of Infectious Diseases, Viale Regina Elena 299, 00161 Rome, Italy

8. Agencia Española del Medicamento y Productos Sanitarios (AEMPS), Coordinación del Plan Nacional Antibióticos (PRAN), calle Campezo 1, EDF. 8. 28022 Madrid, España

9. Sciensano, Veterinary Epidemiology Unit, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, Belgian Federal Research Institute for Public and Animal Health, Rue Juliette Wytsmanstraat 14, 1050 Brussels, Belgium

10. Limerick Regional Veterinary Laboratory, Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, Knockalisheen, Limerick, Ireland
V94 WK44

11. Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety, Mauerstrasse 39-42, 10117 Berlin, Germany

12. Norwegian Veterinary Institute (NVI), Pb 750 Sentrum, N0106 Oslo, Norway

13. Finnish Food Authority, Laboratory and Research Division, Microbiology Unit, Mustialankatu 3, 00790 Helsinki, Finland

14. Institute for State Control of Veterinary Biologicals and Medicines (ISCVBM), Hudcova 56 A, Brno, the Czech Republic

15. University of West Attica, Department of Public Health Policy, School of Public Health, Athens, Greece

16. Ministry of Rural Development and Food, Minister's Cabinet, 2 Acharnon Str., Athens, Greece

17. EU-JAMRAI is acknowledged at the end of the article

Correspondence: Jean-Yves Madec (jean-yves.madec@anses.fr)

**Citation style for this article:**

Mader Rodolphe, Damborg Peter, Amat Jean-Philippe, Bengtsson Björn, Bourély Clémence, Broens Els M, Busani Luca, Crespo-Robledo Paloma, Filippitzi Maria-Eleni, Fitzgerald William, Kaspar Heike, Madero Cristina Muñoz, Norström Madelaine, Nykäsenoja Suvi, Pedersen Karl, Pokludova Lucie, Urdahl Anne Margrete, Vatopoulos Alkiviadis, Zafeiridis Christos, Madec Jean-Yves, on behalf of EU-JAMRAI17. Building the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance network in veterinary medicine (EARS-Vet). Euro Surveill. 2021;26(4):pii=2001359. https://doi.org/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2021.26.4.2001359

Article submitted on 06 Jul 2020 / accepted on 26 Nov 2020 / published on 28 Jan 2021

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) should be tackled through a One Health approach, as stated in the World Health Organization Global Action Plan on AMR. We describe the landscape of AMR surveillance in the European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA) and underline a gap regarding veterinary medicine. Current AMR surveillance efforts are of limited help to veterinary practitioners and policymakers seeking to improve antimicrobial stewardship in animal health. We propose to establish the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance network in Veterinary medicine (EARS-Vet) to report on the AMR situation, follow AMR trends and detect emerging AMR in selected bacterial pathogens of animals. This information could be useful to advise policymakers, explore efficacy of interventions, support antimicrobial stewardship initiatives, (re-)evaluate marketing authorisations of antimicrobials, generate epidemiological cut-off values, assess risk of zoonotic AMR transmission and evaluate the burden of AMR in animal health. EARS-Vet could be integrated with other AMR monitoring systems in

the animal and medical sectors to ensure a One Health approach. Herein, we present a strategy to establish EARS-Vet as a network of national surveillance systems and highlight challenges of data harmonisation and bias. Strong political commitment at national and EU/EEA levels is required for the success of EARS-Vet.

## Background

A One Health surveillance approach is needed to face the challenges of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), as stated in the World Health Organization (WHO) Global Action Plan on AMR [1] and the European Union (EU) One Health Action Plan against AMR [2]. At the EU/ European Economic Area (EEA) level, in the human sector, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) coordinates the European Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance Network (EARS-Net), which monitors AMR in invasive bacteria isolated from blood and cerebrospinal fluid in hospitalised patients [3], and the European Food- and Waterborne Diseases and Zoonoses Network (FWD-Net), which monitors

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authorisations of antimicrobials, in the framework of Regulation (EU) 2019/6 [20].

Moreover, EARS-Vet data would support antimicrobial stewardship initiatives, especially the development of veterinary antimicrobial treatment guidelines, which need accurate resistance data of animal pathogens. However, because of differences between countries in terms of animal populations, production systems, bacterial diseases, available authorised antimicrobials and resistance levels, such recommendations would need to be tailored to each country and only general indications could be defined at the European level. In addition, interpretative criteria for AST, i.e. epidemiological cut-off values and clinical breakpoints, are currently missing for many common combinations of animal species, bacterial species and infection sites. This challenges the interpretation of AST results in the veterinary field and from an epidemiological perspective. EARS-Vet could facilitate the defining of missing interpretative criteria by sharing its distributions of AST results to breakpoint-setting organisations such as the Veterinary Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (VetCAST).

EARS-Vet would support assessment of the risk of AMR transmission from animals to humans via non-food-borne routes, e.g. by direct contact with companion or food-producing animals. This would complement the risk assessments performed by EFSA for the food-borne pathway.

Finally, EARS-Vet could provide information to aid in assessing the burden of AMR in animal health, e.g. attributable deaths caused by infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Such an estimation could be similar to the burden assessments performed in the human sector [22], which are particularly useful to raise awareness of the need to tackle AMR.

## Fostering harmonisation and synergies

EARS-Vet would provide the necessary coordination to collectively define common microbiological and epidemiological standards for the surveillance of AMR in animal bacterial pathogens in Europe, as well as a strategy to reach effective harmonisation. More broadly, EARS-Vet would represent an opportunity to build a European scientific community and knowledge hub to support the establishment, improvement and harmonisation of respective national surveillance systems, the interpretation of surveillance outputs and their translation into interventions. This EARS-Vet community could also prove useful in urgent contexts; for example, when an emerging resistance mechanism is discovered and its spread across Europe needs to be quickly evaluated, as experienced in 2015 upon the discovery of plasmid-mediated colistin resistance [23].

## A pragmatic strategy to design EARS-Vet

One of the first steps in designing EARS-Vet would be the definition of a surveillance framework, including

its: (i) surveillance scope (i.e. the animal species, production types (e.g. dairy or beef cattle, laying hens or broilers), age categories, bacterial species, specimens and antimicrobials it covers), (ii) AST standards, (iii) metadata to be collected (including minimum and desirable variables), (iv) data governance, (v) frequency of data reporting, (vi) general data management system and (vii) required procedures (including data cleaning and validation), as well as (viii) how data would be analysed and communicated.

This framework should ensure that EARS-Vet can meet the aforementioned surveillance objectives and facilitate broad country participation. It should also address two major challenges for EARS-Vet: the current lack of method harmonisation and possible sampling biases.

To reach harmonisation, we suggest that standards are defined in an inclusive and bottom-up approach, i.e. according to what is considered relevant and feasible within countries. In the beginning, we envisage a transition period where different AST standards would be accepted, as originally done by EARS-Net over two decades, before accepting only those methods complying with the European Committee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing (EUCAST).

The possible sampling biases are linked to the fact that national surveillance systems usually collect AST results routinely produced in veterinary diagnostic laboratories. As culture of veterinary diagnostic specimens is often not performed until treatment failure, AMR levels tend to be overestimated compared with first-time infections [24]. Such biased estimates can have important consequences, including wrongly recommending the use of critically important antimicrobials as first-line treatments when other antimicrobials will actually be effective in the majority of cases. In order to ensure comparability of AMR data between countries, the representativeness of AMR data would need to be assessed before results are interpreted. As in EARS-Net, a series of indicators of national geographic coverage and representativeness could be defined and regularly calculated to understand the validity of the surveillance data. In addition, pragmatic solutions should be explored collectively to address sampling biases. Of note, some countries have decided to subsidise ASTs (e.g. Czech Republic and Spain) to collect more representative AMR data comprising a broader range of cases, i.e. not only those after treatment failure.

## Coordination and sustainability of EARS-Vet

Several successful initiatives, such as EARS-Net and ESVAC, have proven that a European surveillance network can be developed gradually, starting with a group of countries collaborating despite initial lack of harmonisation. Long-term success of EARS-Vet would depend on political commitment at national and European levels, accompanied by sustainable funding. In particular,

<figure><img src="image_3.png" /></figure>
the European Commission and the EU/EEA countries could play a role in supporting the development of national surveillance systems for AMR in diseased animals and fostering the participation of national agencies in the EARS-Vet initiative.

From a regulatory perspective, the Animal Health Law (applying from April 2021) presents the opportunity to implement AMR surveillance in bacterial pathogens of animals in the EU for the first time. Thus, developing EARS-Vet is timely and could set the basis for a future regulated surveillance network.

## Conclusion

Antimicrobial resistance in animal bacterial pathogens represents a gap in the European One Health strategy on AMR surveillance. Here, we provide a perspective on the multiple anticipated benefits of establishing EARS-Vet and show how such a system could complement the existing European monitoring systems for AMR and AMC, in humans and animals coordinated by ECDC, EFSA and EMA. We have devised a pragmatic strategy to build EARS-Vet, which results from a collective agreement of EU-JAMRAI partners involved in the veterinary and medical sectors. It addresses the two main obstacles that EARS-Vet would face: the current lack of harmonisation in terms of methods and possibly biased surveillance data. In the coming years, more and more countries are expected to build national surveillance systems for AMR in diseased animals. In the absence of a European-level framework, this could lead to a further lack of harmonisation. The Animal Health Law, applying from April 2021, presents the opportunity for possible regulation of AMR surveillance in diseased animals in the EU/EEA, which would coincide well with the establishment of EARS-Vet.

## Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to all the professionals who were consulted as part of this work. These include participants of EARS-Vet meetings in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Ireland, Spain, Belgium, Italy and Greece, as well as experts from the ECDC, EMA, EFSA, Federation of Veterinarians in Europe, EUCAST, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), World Health Organization (WHO) and the Netherlands' National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), as a WHO Collaborating Centre for Antimicrobial Resistance Epidemiology and Surveillance. The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of consulted experts and organisations.

**Funding statement:** The project EU-JAMRAI has received funding from the Health Program of the European Union (2014-2020) under grant agreement N°761296.

## Conflict of interest

None declared.

## Authors' contributions

Rodolphe Mader consulted acknowledged experts; coordinated the discussions that led to the identification of the AMR surveillance gap, the expected benefits of EARS-Vet and the strategy and challenges to set up EARS-Vet; and drafted the initial manuscript. Jean-Yves Madec, Cristina Muñoz Madero and Jean-Philippe Amat supervised this work. Rodolphe Mader, Peter Damborg, Jean-Philippe Amat, Björn Bengtsson, Clémence Bourély, Els M Broens, Luca Busani, Paloma Crespo-Robledo, Maria-Eleni Filippitzi, William Fitzgerald, Heike Kaspar, Cristina Muñoz Madero, Madelaine Norström, Suvi Nykäsenoja, Karl Pedersen, Lucie Pokludova, Anne Margrete Urdahl, Alkiviadis Vatopoulos, Christos Zafeiridis and Jean-Yves Madec, on behalf of EU-JAMRAI, have participated in the aforementioned discussions, reviewed the draft for important intellectual content and approved the final version.

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