Healthy probiotics show promise for replacing overused antibiotics in farm animals

Sunday, November 24, 2013 by: PF Louis
Tags: healthy probiotics, farm animals, overused antibiotics

(NaturalNews) It's well known that antibiotics are used heavily on factory farm animals. Their close quarters in CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) are breeding farms for pathogenic bacteria and parasites. In order to curb infectious diseases among farm animals, antibiotics are used widely. So widely that 70% to 80% of all antibiotic use goes into farm animals through feed and injections.

But this trend is slowly changing, perhaps too slowly. It has started in Japan and the EU already, and a few American farmers are picking up on the practice of using natural protections against infectious disease with their confined animals. Of course, maybe someday enormous lots of confined animals for slaughter or mass producing dairy and eggs will become outmoded, maybe, hopefully.

The problem as it is currently

Most factory farmers' main concern probably isn't food safety. Bacterial, fungal and parasite infestation ihibits livestock growth, making the livestock's meat less marketable. Big dairy farmers use antibiotics to keep cows' udders from getting so infected that they can't keep producing milk. But those infections come from hormones, such as rBGH (thanks Monsanto), to increase milking yields and over-machine-milking itself.

The whole business of factory farms, with farm animals being fed GMO corn and soy mash, is animal cruelty that comes back to haunt human consumers with degraded health. And mainstream medicine's concern is the curse of increased pathogenic resistance to antibiotics.

There are two avenues of human overuse of antibiotics leading to antibiotics resistance:

Primary: Where, every time you get the sniffles or any infection, physicians prescribe antibiotics. During a hospital stay, you may even have 24/7 IV antibiotics and leave with oral prescriptions for weeks or months.

Secondary: Where the factory farm products you eat bring the animals' antibiotics into your system. It's like second hand cigarette smoke, but it's edibles instead.

Frankly, until natural antibiotics such as colloidal silver and others are recognized and used, and until mainstream medical practitioners advocate probiotic use during and after antibiotic runs, who needs Big Pharma's toxic antibiotics? Here's how bad they can get (http://www.naturalnews.com).

Farm animal antibiotic solutions

In 2006, the EU had banned using antibiotics in feed to fatten and beef up livestock. So farmers were forced into other options, such as prebiotics and probiotics to help create a high enough gut probiotic population that would discourage pathogenic bacteria and parasites from flourishing.

Zinc was also added with its positively charged molecules (cations) that would draw away negatively charged pathogens.

Earlier in 2013, a team of German scientists found that piglets fed probiotic Enterococcus faecium showed reduced numbers of extra-intestinal pathogenic E. coli (ExPEC) strains in their intestinal mucosa.

Previous probiotic studies on piglets could only determine that ExPEC-caused diseases were thwarted but didn't determine any difference in their gut microbial composition.

This more recent study determined that ExPEC strains and their disease-causing genes were greatly lessened with E. faecium. The recent study also determined that there are E. coli strains which are beneficial, and those strains were not disturbed by E. faecium, even as it destroyed pathogenic E. coli.

A couple of farmers in Pennsylvania, USA, got bold and used a diluted oregano oil feed mixture made in the Netherlands. It had been tested against a Bayer antibiotic feed product in Europe and outperformed it without side effects.

Oregano oil is a strong natural antimicrobial, antifungal and antiparasite. The first farmer used it on his chickens. A neighboring pig farmer was so impressed with the chicken farmer's results that he tried it on his weaning piglets.

Both farmers noticed that their animals were less dehydrated, livelier and healthier with the Dutch oregano oil feed. Hopefully, this will catch on more.

Sources for this article include:

http://www.eurekalert.org

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

http://www.naturalnews.com

http://www.univagro-iasi.ro

http://science.naturalnews.com

http://science.naturalnews.com