11. Wolfgang Witte, "Medical Consequences of Antibiotic Use in Agriculture," Science, 279, 996-997 (13 February 1998).The development of resistance to antibiotics in infectious organisms is a cause of increasing concern. The resistance arises either from new mutations or the acquisition of genes for resistance from other organisms.
An arena for the development of antibiotic resistance is found in animal husbandry in which antibiotics are used for prophylaxis, chemotherapy, and perhaps more importantly, for growth promotion: a thousand times more of the antibiotics, as detailed in this study, are fed to animals than are used in medicine. As far back as 1969 the Swann Committee in the United Kingdom concluded that antibiotics used in human chemotherapy shoud not be used as growth promoters in animals. That advice has been largely disregarded in many countries.
This article offers a very thorough analysis of the mechanisms and consequences of the indiscriminate use of amntibiotics in agriculture and argues for an international effort to control this practice.
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