Modelling the impact of antimicrobial use and external introductions on commensal E. coli colistin resistance in small‐scale chicken farms of the Mekong delta of Vietnam

Colistin is a critically important antimicrobial for human medicine, and colistin‐resistant Escherichia coli are commonly found in poultry and poultry products in Southeast Asia. Here, we aim at disentangling the within‐farm and outside‐farm drivers of colistin resistance in small‐scale chicken farms of the Mekong delta of Vietnam. Nineteen Vietnamese chicken farms were followed up along a whole production cycle, during which weekly antimicrobial use data were recorded. At the beginning, middle and end of each production cycle, commensal E. coli samples from birds were collected, pooled and tested for colistin resistance. Twelve models were fitted to the data using an expectation–maximization algorithm and compared. We further tested the spatial clustering of the occurrence of resistance importations from external sources using the local Moran's I statistic. In the best model, colistin resistance in E. coli from chickens was found to be mostly affected by importations of resistance, and, to a lesser extent, by the use of antimicrobials in the last 1.73 weeks [0.00; 2.90], but not by the use of antimicrobials in day‐olds, nor their colistin resistance carriage from hatchery. The occurrence of external source importations proved to be sometimes spatially clustered, suggesting a role of local environmental sources of colistin resistance.