MLBA9: June / July 2009

 

 

 

 

Everyone in feed and livestock knows that there's far more to antibiotics than merely clean­ing up bacterial infections. When fed to growing livestock, antibiotics in­crease feed conversion ratios and help safeguard livestock from dangerous bacteria, thereby greatly improving animal performance.

 

Yet, after half a century when an­tibiotic growth promoters (AGPs) be­came an integral part of the agribusi­ness landscape, their eventual phasing out is starting to look inevitable.

 

This is certainly not a change that feed and livestock producers wel­come. Indeed, the first, knee-jerk re­action of most meat and livestock in­dustry associations is to resist moves to restrict the use of AGPs.

 

Yet, a closer analysis of the situ­ation implies that the most intelli­gent course of action is to modify the agribusiness model and move on to sustainable alternatives to AGPs. In particular, even if US agribusiness resists the move, we will see that the consumer market may move that way anyhow.

 

Furthermore, it must be said that the productivity increase and cost savings gained by AGPs were always a running battle. Bacteria inevitably became immune to new antibiotic compounds, rendering them ineffec­tive, both as AGPs and for the treat­ment of livestock diseases. By using AGPs in healthy animals, the rate at which antibiotics were rendered ob­solete in the treatment of both human and livestock diseases was greatly ac­celerated. Indeed, many researchers openly wonder if bacteria will even­tual out-race our capacity to develop new antibiotics

 

Most worryingly, over time, sci­entific research discovered that re­sidual AGP traces in meat and animal feces greatly accelerated the develop­ment of highly virulent, antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, countless scientific studies implicated indiscriminate an­tibiotic use in both humans and live­stock had accelerated the evolution of highly virulent resistant pathogens, some of which had few, if any, anti­dotes.