Livestock Antibiotics Use and Antimicrobial Resistance

For this narrative review, we searched articles on PubMed and Google Scholar using the terms antibiotic resistance, livestock, and environment, alone or in combination.

The history of antibiotic use in livestock and its link to increased AMR, along with the involved mechanisms, including the enzymatic breakdown of antibiotics, alterations in bacterial targets, horizontal gene transfer, and efflux pumps, are important. Antibiotics in livestock are used for growth promotion, disease prevention and control, and metaphylactic use. The role of livestock and the environment as reservoirs for resistant pathogens, their impact on human health, chronic infections, allergic reactions, toxicity, and the development of untreatable diseases is important to understand AMR.