Antibiotic Resistance FAQs
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How does the use of antibiotics in farm animals make human diseases harder to treat?
Antibiotics used in animals can make human diseases harder to treat by generating disease-causing organisms that will not respond to antibiotic therapy. One way this can happen stems from the fact that animals harbor strains of bacteria in their intestines that cause disease in people. Mixing an animal's food and water with antibiotics can lead to the build up of resistant bacteria in the animal's intestines. This is a fairly common practice used in agriculture to prevent, not cure, disease. It's called subtherapeutic use of antibiotics. The idea is that if the animal never gets sick, because its got antibiotics in its system all the time, the animal will remain healthy and grow faster.
Mechanized slaughter and processing often results in the contamination of animal carcasses with intestinal contents, including resistant bacteria. People can become sick by, for example, eating undercooked meat contaminated with the resistant bacteria.
Most instances a foodborne illness resolve themselves without treatment. But serious cases require medical care including treatment with antibiotics. If antibiotics are required, but the disease-causing organisms are resistant, doctors may lack an effective drug to treat the illness. The organisms may be resistant because a number of the antibiotics used as growth promoters in farm animals are the same as, or are related to, drugs used to fight bacterial disease in people.
The practice of feeding antibiotics to animals can also lead to the development of of difficult-to-treat illnesses in other ways. Drug-resistant traits can build up in organisms that are ordinarily harmless to both animals and humans, but which may become a problem under special circumstances. An example is with the group of bacteria called Enterococci, that are found in the intestines and usually do not cause problems. But if they reach other parts of the body, during the course of an operation, for example, they can cause dangerous infections. If the infections are resistant to the therapy, serious consequences can result.
Why are antibiotics1 used in animal agriculture?
As with people, antibiotics are sometimes given to food animals to treat disease. But drugs are also given in enormous quantities to animals solely to facilitate feed efficiency. The best estimate currently available is that nearly 25 million pounds of antibiotics are given to farm animals for nontherapeutic purposes, such as growth promotion and disease prevention.
The intensely crowded and sometimes unsanitary conditions of modern industrial livestock production result in stressed animals. Most of the over eight billion cattle, poultry, and swine raised in the United States each year receive some type of antibiotic during their lifetime to promote growth. But this reliance on low-level use of antibiotics need not be a requirement for modern animal agriculture. As a 2000 World Health Organization report emphasized, "...farmers who stopped relying on antimicrobials as growth promoters in livestock have experienced no economic repercussions - provided animals were given enough space, clean water, and high-grade feed."
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