Flux carefully. Cut Power antibiotics slashes chickens resistance microbe drugs in people
CHICAGO -. Researchers have long warned that the use of antibiotics in livestock could reproduce resistant bacteria drugs that infect people. Now a study has confirmed and underlined an easy solution: Ban on use of a drug called avoparcin on farms significantly reduce the resistance of the microbe to a related drug, vancomycin in hospitalized patients in Belgium. The results were presented here on December 17 at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
European farmers added avoparcin in feed for chickens and pigs to prevent infections and fatten animals on less food, until the European Union has banned this practice in 1997. C ' is because doctors need the antibiotic vancomycin, which is chemically similar to avoparcin, to treat life-threatening infections of enterococci bacteria called that normally live in the human gut. Researchers fear that the gut microbes resistant chickens and pigs drugs could contaminate the meat and take up residence in the human gut ( Science , 5 May 00, p. 792). The researchers knew that enteroccoci resistant to vancomycin has become rare in the supermarket chicken meat after the ban. But they did not know if this decline affected resistance.
To find out, microbiologist Greet Ieven of the University of Antwerp and enterococci colleagues cultured from stool samples of 353 patients hospitalized in May and June 01 and tested to see how many survived levels high vancomycin. Only three of the cultures of enterococci, or 0.6%, resisted Vancomycin - a sharp fall from 5.7% in 1996, resistance rates when avoparcin was still largely fed to livestock. molecular genetic analysis confirmed that the prevalence of a key gene of resistance to vancomycin has dropped from 5.7% to 0.8%. Because vancomycin is used as widely in Belgian hospitals now as 5 years ago, the results suggest that vancomycin resistance in enterococci human origin infections largely on farms, said Ieven.
The results "confirm what people thought could happen in the clinic," agrees pharmacologist Michael Dudley Mikrozid Pharmaceuticals in Mountain View, California. Combined with previous findings, the results indicate that antibiotic resistance flows like water from farms to clinics, he said, so stopping the use of avoparcin, "you stop the tap."
Related Sites
sheet on the use of antibiotics in animals of the Alliance for the Prudent Use of Antibiotics
Dueling fact sheet information from the Institute for animal health,
a trade group representing manufacturers of antibiotics in animals
Editorial on eliminating antibiotics in animal nutrition
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