European-wide antimicrobial resistance monitoring in commensal Escherichia coli isolated from healthy food animals between 2004 and 2018

The objective was to describe the susceptibility of Escherichia coli to medically important antibiotics, collected over four periods (2004–2006, 2008–2009, 2013–2014, 2017–2018), from food-producing animals at slaughter.

In this pan-EU survey antibiotic susceptibility of commensal E. coli varied largely between antibiotics, animal species and countries. Resistance to critically important antibiotics for human medicine was absent or low, except for ciprofloxacin in broilers and ampicillin in pigs and broilers.