Complex Insight - Understanding our world

Antibiotic use in agriculture tends to be a tension filled debate.  Farmers  want healthy stock and the use of antibiotics as with people has had a major impact. However use of antiobiotics in farming helps accelerate bacterial evolution and antibiotic resistance. The debate around antibiotic overuse on farms or over perscription in human medicine and the relation to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, how antibiotic resistant strains migrate from farms to elswhere is ongoing. The human and financial impact and cost of antiobiotic overuse  in agriculture has until now been a grey area of discussion.  A multi-national team of researchers recently published their findings to these questions in the open journal Emerging Infectious disease published by CDC. They found  number of avoidable deaths and the costs of health care potentially caused by third-generation cephalosporin use in food animals is a staggering 1,518 deaths and 67,236 days in the hospital, every year, which would not otherwise have occurred. Considering those factors, they recommend the ongoing use of these antimicrobial drugs in mass therapy and prophylaxis should be urgently examined and stopped, particularly in poultry.  The article and technical appendix are worth reading.