FARMERS should stop using antibiotics as growth promoters, say researchers in
the US. They have uncovered evidence of a new route by which dangerous
antibiotic resistance genes can spread.
There is already strong evidence that feeding animals antibiotics can lead to
the emergence of resistant strains of gut bacteria such as salmonella, which can
then be passed on to people in food or through direct contact with animals. Now
microbiologist Rustam Aminov of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
and his colleagues have discovered that bacteria in the soil and groundwater
beneath farms seem to be acquiring tetracycline resistance genes…
