Selection of Multidrug-Resistant Bacteria in Medicated Animal Feeds

The authors have effectively demonstrated that selection and enrichment of AMR bacteria can occur in feeds, and most significantly, even when feeds are medicated with antibiotics not used in human medicine co-selection of resistance to clinically significant antibiotics can occur for bacterial strains harboring multiple resistance traits.

Animal feeds are immensely variable in terms of their ingredient composition, background bacteria profiles, storage and handling conditions, and any or all of these factors may impact the extent to which selection and enrichment of AMR bacteria might occur. However, we observed significant recovery of the MDR model strain under different conditions even with a small sampling of randomly acquired feeds.