Developing Alternatives to Antibiotics Used in Food Animal Production

Stacy Sneeringer

Amber Waves:The Economics of Food, Farming, Natural Resources, and Rural America, 2019, vol. May 2019, issue 04

Abstract: Antibiotics are a lifesaving technology widely used in human and veterinary medicine. However, the use of antibiotic drugs can also create selective evolutionary pressures that can spawn microbes and genes resistant to the drugs. Livestock agriculture is a major consumer of antibiotics and, thus, a contributor to antibiotic resistance. Development of alternative pharmaceutical products can help limit the spread of antibiotic resistance by reducing the use of antibiotics pertinent for human disease treatment in food-animal production. The animal pharmaceutical industry continues to develop new drugs, but a growing share are generic versions of existing animal drugs or are designed for companion animals (instead of food animals).

Keywords: Livestock; Production/Industries (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/302713/files/U ... mal%20Production.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:uersaw:302713

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.302713

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Amber Waves:The Economics of Food, Farming, Natural Resources, and Rural America from United States Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().