What is an Opportunity Map?
Opportunity mapping is a way to highlight opportunities within a system. The opportunities identified in this website reflect products, processes, and services that can be used to help reduce the transmission of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
- In some cases, the opportunity lies in spreading awareness and increasing adoption of existing solutions.
- In other cases, there are solutions that have opportunity for improvement.
- In yet more cases, there are no tools or solutions available – yet. However, a need has been identified, and innovators can capitalize on the opportunity to create something new.
Where applicable, opportunities in this website have been assigned a maturity level rating to help you identify the stage of innovation that the solution is at. In addition, relevant research, related solutions, and categorization has been assigned to each opportunity.
Ways To Explore This Site:
Fighting AMR
All AMR intervention opportunities have been broken up into four pillars: Immune Support, Environmental Protection, Surveillance and Tracking, and Treatment Optimization.
Beef Cattle System
Explore the AMR intervention opportunities in context. Journey through each of the beef cattle production phases to understand the specific goals, needs, and challenges.
What is AMR?
According to the World Health Organization, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the biggest health threats facing humanity. Bacteria, viruses, parasites, and fungi are evolving to become resistant to our existing antimicrobial drugs (antibiotics, antivirals, anti-parasitics, and anti-fungals), and the discovery of effective new drugs is not keeping pace. In 2016, at least 700,000 people died due to drug-resistant infections. By 2050, this could jump to 10 million human lives lost per year.
A One Health Perspective
Click on the purple icons to learn some examples of why AMR requires a One Health solution.
A One Health approach recognizes the interconnected relationships between human, animal, and environmental health. To solve some of our world’s most complex and far-reaching issues, we require holistic solutions across disciplines and across borders. This website was created as part of a study to explore the role of interactive visualizations and “system maps” in helping to share knowledge across disciplines and to aid in collaborative efforts to find solutions to the One Health issue of antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Why Beef Cattle?
You might be wondering, if AMR is a One Health issue then why is this website primarily dedicated to opportunities in the beef cattle industry? Good question. We chose to center our study around the beef cattle industry because it is a complex, fascinating, and innovative system, and because we believe it serves as an excellent example to study. Within the beef cattle industry, there are opportunities for everyone from entrepreneurs, to technology developers, to policy-makers, to the general public to help reduce the transmission of AMR. This multi-disciplinary audience gives us the chance to test our knowledge-sharing tools across a complex (but bounded) system. We hope that some of our methods will prove to be effective, and will be adopted by other systems and industries to promote opportunities to reduce AMR in other fields or geographical locations.
We hope that this website will help you to:
Additional Resources
Beef Cattle Organizations
This page contains tables that you can sort and filter to find links to a number of organizations within the beef cattle industry.
Beef Cattle Resources
You can also search different topics by their information presentation type (e.g., videos, podcasts, articles)
AMR Resources
This page contains tables that you can sort and filter to find general AMR resources, organizations, and initiatives.
