25 Aug 2017
New research from the USA indicates that feeding waste milk, a common practice in the dairy industry, appears to increase the antibiotic resistance in fecal bacteria of calves (measured by E. coli in this study), and to a lesser extent, respiratory bacteria (measured by P. multocida). Also, the high degree of resistance of both bacteria to antibiotics that were rarely used on never used on the dairies in the study suggest that horizontal transmission of genetic resistance from other bacteria in the environment or other animals may contribute to antibiotic resistance in young calves.
