Antibiotics in animal husbandry: is there an alternative?
Approximately 160,000 tons of antibiotics were fed to farm animals globally in 2020. This figure is projected to reach 200,000 tons by 2030.
The use of antibiotics has become the norm in modern animal agriculture, as these drugs not only help prevent bacterial infections in animals but also promote weight gain. Eighty percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are fed to cattle, poultry, and fish on industrial farms. This use of antibiotics is a major factor in the spread of antibiotic resistance.
The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that farmers and the food industry immediately stop using antibiotics to increase animal weight and prevent disease in healthy animals. The risk of developing multiple resistance in microbes is extremely high. In addition to the medical and ethical aspects of using antibiotics to promote animal weight gain, there are also economic ones. The World Bank warns that by 2050, antibiotic-resistant infections could cause damage to the global economy comparable to that of the 2008 financial crisis.
Factory farms have been using antibiotics to boost animal weight since 1946. This is done to increase profitability, but new data shows that the net profit is actually negative because the cost of antibiotics is higher than the additional profit.
According to the Danish Food and Drug Administration, 68% of pigs on conventional farms carry methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), compared to only 6% on organic farms. Researchers have shown that access to fresh air helps animals shed the bacteria, reducing the risk of infection and the spread of MRSA.
Conventional farms are ideal breeding grounds for infectious diseases. Animals on conventional pig farms are carriers of MRSA primarily due to their constant use of antibiotics. These animals consume 20 times more antibiotics than pigs on organic farms. On conventional farms, animals are kept in poor conditions—in confined and cramped spaces—their stress levels are elevated, which suppresses their immune system. Consequently, the likelihood of developing and spreading infections is significantly higher on conventional farms than on organic farms.
Among the methods of preventing infectious diseases on industrial farms, bacteriophages—bacterial viruses that are capable of specifically destroying pathogenic target bacteria, particularly antibiotic-resistant ones—are currently being actively researched.
Read also: Bacteriophages in agriculture and fisheries