NARMS · One Health surveillance
The National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System connects evidence from people, retail meats and food animals while preserving three different sampling systems. “One Health” does not make those populations interchangeable.
Three partners, three evidence streams
CDC describes NARMS as a U.S. public-health surveillance system for antimicrobial resistance in foodborne and other enteric bacteria. The partnership includes CDC, the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and state and local health departments.
CDC tests human isolates for named enteric pathogens. FDA examines isolates from retail meat and seafood samples, while USDA examines isolates from food-producing animal specimens collected at federally inspected slaughter and processing plants. The organisms, specimens, collection frames and agency purposes overlap in some places and differ in others.
What can be connected responsibly
Analysts can compare whether the same organism, resistance definition and time window appear across streams and then examine the program’s integrated reports. Genetic or epidemiologic evidence may help investigators study possible transmission pathways. A parallel pattern, however, is not proof that one sampled source caused infections in another population.
Every reported value should travel with its agency, specimen source, organism, susceptibility method, geography and period. A human clinical isolate is not the same observation as a retail-food or animal specimen.
Questions for a One Health chart
- Are the organism and resistance phenotype defined the same way?
- Were sampling and laboratory methods stable across the period?
- Does the denominator represent tested isolates, samples or people?
- Does the source describe trend, association or a traced outbreak?
What readers can verify next
Use the current NARMS data notes and partner documentation before comparing sectors. Surveillance can guide public-health questions and priorities; it cannot determine an individual diagnosis or select an antibiotic. Any time-sensitive trend must be refreshed against the exact release used at publication.