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. 2014 Jun;122(6):A160-5.
doi: 10.1289/ehp.122-A160.

Reduced antibiotic use in livestock: how Denmark tackled resistance

Sharon Levy

Reduced antibiotic use in livestock: how Denmark tackled resistance

Sharon Levy. Environ Health Perspect. 2014 Jun.
No abstract available

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“The bacterial community in the gut of an animal or person is an extremely competitive environment. If you don’t have antimicrobials being used and creating selective pressure for resistance, you’ll get rid of that trait in the long run.” –Yvonne Agersø, Technical University of Denmark © Roy Scott
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Antibiotics in U.S. Agriculture
2011 U.S. livestock producers purchased 29.9 million pounds of antimicrobials, including millions of pounds of drugs that are prohibited for nontherapeutic agricultural use in the European Union. It is unknown how much of this was used for growth promotion and disease prevention, although in 2001 the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that nontherapeutic uses accounted for 93% of the antibiotics used in U.S. livestock. The United States uses more antibiotics per kilogram of meat and poultry produced than any other developed country.
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The Need for International Standards
Unfortunately, Denmark’s comprehensive reform of antibiotic use in agriculture doesn’t necessarily mean Danes are safe from antibiotic-resistant pathogens carried in animals or meat. That’s illustrated by recent work by Yvonne Agersø tracking the emergence of bacteria that carry a gene for the production of extended spectrum β-lactamase (ESBL) enzymes, which confer resistance to both penicillins and cephalosporins. Cephalosporins have been widely used as growth promoters in chickens in some parts of the world, but were never used on Danish poultry. Yet recent data show a dramatic rise in the incidence of ESBL-producing Escherichia coli bacteria in chicken meat sold in Denmark. In 2012 testing showed that 61% of samples of imported chicken were contaminated with ESBL-producing E. coli, but the same kinds of microbes also were identified in 36% of samples from poultry raised in Denmark, even though the chickens had never received cephalosporins. Agersø and her colleagues tracked the resistant microbes back through generations of birds. The grandparents of the contaminated Danish chickens had been imported from Scotland, where they were treated with cephalosporins very early in life, and resistant bacteria passed from one generation to the next. A Swedish team recently reported similar findings for chickens in that country. The findings point up the need for international standards restricting the agricultural use of antibiotics.
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