Misuse of antibiotics in poultry farms is leading to a proliferation of multidrug-resistant bacteria. To make matters worse, these bacteria are now spreading in the environment because of unsafe disposal of poultry litter and waste in agricultural fields—this has a potential to infect human beings, says a new study from the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).
The study titled ‘Antibiotic Resistance in Poultry Environment’—conducted by CSE’s Pollution Monitoring Laboratory, collected samples of litter and soil from in and around 12 randomly selected poultry farms. These were located in four key poultry-producing states in north India— Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Rajasthan, and Punjab. A total of 217 isolates of three types of bacteria— Escherichia coli (E. coli), Klebsiella pneumoniae, and Staphylococcus lentus— were extracted and tested for resistance against 16 antibiotics. Ten of these antibiotics have been declared critically important (CI) for humans by the World Health Organization (WHO).
The poultry farms identified by CSE for this study are spread out across 12 different clusters in nine districts. CSE researchers found that antibiotics were being used in these poultry farms and that the litter was used as manure in neighbouring agricultural lands. As a control, the study also collected 12 soil samples at a distance of 10–20 km from the respective farms, where the litter was not being used as manure.
Releasing the findings of the CSE study, Chandra Bhushan, deputy director general, CSE, said: “Antibiotic misuse is common in the poultry sector. What makes the situation worse is the fact that the sector is also plagued with poor waste management. Therefore, we first wanted to understand the extent of antibiotic resistance in the poultry environment, and then establish if the resistant bacteria is moving out of the poultry farms into the environment through waste disposal.”
Poultry Environment— Reservoir of Multidrug- Resistant Bacteria
This story is from the October 2017 edition of TerraGreen.
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This story is from the October 2017 edition of TerraGreen.
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