Banning the use of certain antibiotics to treat livestock helps prevent the development of drug-resistant germs in people. Australia’s decision to forego the use of a class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones—which includes the anti-anthrax drug Ciprofloxacin—in poultry and other animals is the main reason why Australians have very few cases of a certain type of antibiotic-resistant food-poisoning, according to a study in the May 15 issue of the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

Researchers studied laboratory reports from all over Australia of 585 patients who had been infected with Campylobacter jejuni, a common source of food poisoning. The investigators found that about 2% of locally acquired infections were resistant to Ciprofloxacin. (The figures ranged from 0% in Tasmania to nearly 8% in the state of Victoria.)

By contrast, 64% of the Campylobacter infections that participants developed while traveling overseas were resistant to Ciprofloxacin. The study authors report that rates of Cipro-resistant infection in Australia parallel those found in Sweden, which banned the use of fluoroquinolones in livestock in 1986.

What it Means: The widespread use of antibiotics in animals has a direct effect on the ability of those same drugs to treat infections in people. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration prohibited the use of fluoroquinolones for the treatment of poultry in September 2005, after a five-year fight with a drug maker.

From the Archive:
03/17/2006 Will We Run out of Antibiotics?
01/21/2002 Playing Chicken With Our Antibiotics