Are there solutions to antibiotic resistance, or are we running out of time to find new antibiotics?

Free State regional sales manager for Alltech, discusses how farmers can mitigate the use of antibiotics in cattle.

- Alretha Naudé

Over the past 100 years, antibiotics have worked miracles and saved millions of lives.

However, in recent years, antibiotics have become increasingly ineffective as micro-organisms have evolved to resist them. This is known as antibiotic or antimicrobial resistance.

For decades, antibiotics were used in livestock production, the reasons being twofold: to treat and prevent health problems such as respiratory diseases and other bacterial infections, as well as to promote faster growth. This overuse and misuse of antibiotics has resulted in further accelerating the resistance to antibiotics. The acceleration of resistance means that the same infections that were previously treated with antibiotics, no longer respond to antibiotic treatment.

Thus, these infections are more persistent and even life-threatening today. Antibiotic resistance has the potential to become the greatest problem in the livestock production sector if no new antibiotics are developed or if no other solutions are found.

When the global livestock industry first became aware of antibiotic resistance and the severity of this issue, the consensus was to reduce or eliminate the use of antibiotics. Misuse or overuse aside, antibiotics have become a major and critical broad-spectrum solution in industry.

However, according to research done by Dr Richard Murphy from Alltech, reducing or eliminating antibiotics does not reduce antibiotic resistance in microbes that are a concern for human health, such as E. coli, Salmonella and Campylobacter.