West Bengal flags human health risk from poultry antibiotic shots

Dec 18,2023

KOLKATA: A Bengal government wing has written to another department flagging the risks of indiscriminately injecting antibiotics in poultry, saying this could give rise to multidrug-resistant bacteria in humans who consume such birds.

The letter from the health department to the animal husbandry department was timely and important, said senior physicians. Humans have, in the recent past, developed serious resistance to more than 20 antibiotics, as a result of which bacterial infections have emerged as a major problem and a cause of death in hospitals.

The indiscriminate use of antibiotics was the primary reason for this, experts said - and regularly eating chicken laced with antibiotics could be just one way you could be getting antibiotics into your system, even if you aren't a pill-popper.

In a recent study by the Center for Science and Environment (CSE), residues of antibiotics were found in the liver, muscle and kidney tissues of chicken samples tested. The researchers looked for traces of six antibiotics commonly used in poultry and they found significant traces of five. The CSE then reviewed surveys in government and private hospitals over a span of 11 years and found very high resistance against ciprofloxacin, doxycycline and tetracyclines, the same antibiotics that were detected in the chicken samples.

"Treating fatal diseases like sepsis, pneumonia and tuberculosis (TB) with fluoroquinolones is becoming tough because microbes that cause these diseases are increasingly becoming resistant to fluoroquinolones," CSE mentioned in the report.

A range of antibiotics - from life-saving, high-end varieties to the more mundane - available over the counter now have 20% to 100% resistance, according to Sayan Chakrabarty, an infectious diseases physician at Kolkata's AMRI Hospitals.

Source: Healthworld