High antibiotic resistance found in Indian poultry

Widespread misuse of antibiotics in the poultry sector has triggered a very high growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in Indian poultry chickens raised for meat and eggs, a new study has found.

The study, the largest of its kind ever to be conducted in India, collected more than 1,500 samples from 530 birds on 18 poultry farms in six districts in Punjab and tested them for resistance to a range of antibiotics critical to human medicine.

Two-thirds of the farms reported using antibiotics for growth promotion. Rampant abuse of antibiotic – mainly as growth promoter – is common in the poorly regulated Indian poultry sector.

These farms are nearly three times more likely to report multi-drug resistant bacteria than those that did not use antibiotics for growth promotion.

Meat producing farms had twice the rates of antimicrobial resistance as compared to egg producing farms, as well as higher rates of multi-drug resistance.

While consumption of chicken or eggs is not directly related to the development of antibiotic resistance in the human, misuse of the drugs makes the disease-causing bugs more dreaded as they can not be killed by common antibiotics in case of an infection.

“Overuse of antibiotics in animal farms endangers us all as it multiplies drug resistance in the environment,” said the lead author of the study Ramanan Laxminarayan, who heads the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics, and Policy in the Washington DC. “Punjab is one of the leading states in India in poultry farming. It is critical that we take measures to end the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in animal breeding practices.”

In the whole of Asia, antimicrobial consumption in chicken is expected to grow by 129% by 2030 and the extreme growth is being driven by the expansion of the poultry sector in India, where areas of high consumption are expected to increase by 312% by 2030.

High levels of resistance to many important antibiotics were found across the board, ranging from 39% for ciprofloxacin (used to treat respiratory infections) to 86% for nalidixic acid, which is used to treat urinary tract infections.

Almost 60% of the Escherichia coli samples analyzed contained ‘resistance conferring’ genes, that not only render many antibiotics ineffective but can also be easily passed on to other types of bacteria, says the study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

“This study has serious implications, not only for India but globally. We must remove antibiotics from the human food chain, except to treat sick animals, or face the increasingly real prospect of a post-antibiotic world,” Laxminarayan added.