A new study sheds light on the consequences of the consumption of animal proteins and antibiotics by livestock: the latter has almost tripled since 2000 the antibiotic resistance of pathogenic bacteria easily transmitted to humans.
It’s a chilling report. While antibiotic resistance will undoubtedly be one of the health challenges facing humanity in the decades to come, the journal Science just published a new studye showing that this antibiotic resistance is far from affecting only humans: by ingesting animal proteins and antibiotics, farm animals have also developed resistance to potentially fatal bacteria. “This paper is the first to track antibiotic resistance in animals globally and finds that resistance has increased dramatically over the past 18 years,” said co-author and principal investigator Ramanan Laxminarayan. ‘study.
Half of antibiotics fail half the time
This new work was carried out by researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich), the Princeton Environmental Institute (PEI) and the Free University of Brussels. They have brought together nearly 1,000 unpublished veterinary publications and reports from around the world to create a map of antimicrobial resistance in low- and middle-income countries. They focused on the most dangerous bacteria for animals and humans, namely Escherichia coli, Campylobacter, Salmonella and Staphylococcus aureus.
They then found that between 2000 and 2018, the proportion of antibiotics with resistance rates above 50% in developing countries had exploded: it rose from 0.15 to 0.41 in chickens and from 0 .13 to 0.34 in pigs. This means that the antibiotics that could be used failed more than half the time in 40% of chickens and in a third of pigs raised for human consumption.
Developing countries on the front line
The researchers also looked at the countries where this bacterial resistance in cattle was the strongest. Antibiotic resistance is most widespread in China, India, Brazil and Kenya. According to the authors, this is because these countries have given a preponderant place to intensive farming in recent years. “We definitely want higher protein diets for as many people as possible, but if that comes at the cost of antibiotics failing, then we need to assess our priorities,” Laxminarayan said. today, meat production accounts for 73% of global antibiotic use. They are the ones who made large-scale animal husbandry and meat consumption possible by reducing infections and increasing the body mass of livestock.
Getting out of all antibiotics is a necessity
For Thomas van Boeckel, first author of the work, this explosion of antibiotic resistance in farm animals is particularly worrying in developing countries because “they continue to experience explosive growth in meat production and consumption, while access to veterinary antimicrobials remains largely unregulated”. “Antimicrobial resistance is a global problem. This alarming trend shows that drugs used in animal husbandry are rapidly losing their effectiveness,” he worries.
According to the researchers, it is urgent that the countries affected by this increase in antibiotic resistance take measures to restrict the use of human antibiotics in farm animals. There is also a need for rich countries to support their transition to sustainable agriculture, possibly through a global fund to subsidize improvements in biosafety and biosecurity. Otherwise, the unrestricted use of antibiotics in even larger numbers of animals raised for human consumption could lead to the global spread of increasingly difficult-to-treat infectious bacteria.
In 2014, the O’Neill report commissioned by the British government already estimated that antimicrobial resistant infections could become the leading cause of death worldwide by 2050, causing 10 million deaths a year.
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