Chapter 15 - Food Microbial Safety and Animal Antibiotics

Abstract

Many scientists, journalists, activists, regulators, and politicians have urged that the routine use of antibiotics in food animals should be eliminated, citing urgent concerns that such use selects for antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria that harm human health and bring nearer a “postantibiotic era” of multidrug-resistant “super-bugs.” Yet, quantitative risk assessment (QRA) estimates of the decrease in human harm (mortality and morbidity) actually caused by reducing animal antibiotic use are typically very small, for example, on the order of as few as zero and not more than a few excess cases per decade or per century for the entire United States population. This paper reviews methods of quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA) and summarizes the results of applying them to several important classes of animal antibiotics that have traditionally been used to reduce diseases, and potentially improve microbial safety, in food animals.