From the farm to the kitchen table: the negative impact of antimicrobial use in animals on humans
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Updated: Aug 17, 2026

Quantitative Polymerase Chain Reaction-based Analyses of Murine Intestinal Microbiota After Oral Antibiotic Treatment
Published on: November 17, 2018
Davidson H Hamer1, Christopher J Gill
1Tufts University School of Medicine, Boston, MA 02111, USA.
Abstract:
Antimicrobials used as growth promotion agents in the livestock and poultry industries appear to result in the spread of drug-resistant pathogens to humans such as vancomycin-resistant enterococci, fluoroquinolone-resistant Campylobacter jejuni, and multidrug-resistant strains of Salmonella enterica. We present some epidemiologic evidence supporting this link and suggest that the use of antimicrobial agents for nontherapeutic purposes in food animals should be severely limited, if not banned altogether.
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