Making the World Antimicrobial Awareness Week 2020 a successful one

To answer this question, we interviewed our colleagues Maria Luiza Ruiz from Latin America and Mohamed Taleb from the Middle East.

In Latin America, the use of antibiotics depends on each country. However, from a general perspective, most states still do not have specific legislation restricting antibiotics in their therapeutic form or as a growth promoter.

There’s still the paradigm that the withdrawal of the antibiotics used for growth promotion damages the animals' performance and increases production costs.

On the other hand, meat exporting countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia are forced to adapt to importers' countries' restrictions. So even though there is no internal legislation that forces the non-use of these chemical molecules, there is a market movement for new and natural alternatives such as phytogenic feed additives.

From a practical point of view, we still have a long way to go. Holistic solutions are increasingly needed.

The reduction in antibiotics' therapeutic use requires more significant investments in nutrition, quality of feed raw materials, and many structural investments in the farms in terms of ambiance such as air conditioning, equipment, biosecurity, more excellent management care, etc.

“In our opinion, the pandemic transforms the world to care more about the health of humans and animals. In this sense, it will be just a matter of time for the feed industry to have more restrictions concerning the use of antibiotics and animal welfare,” says our colleague in Latin America.

Due to the synergy of all agents within a plant, the beneficial effects of phytogenics are many. Mostly targeting livestock performance enhancement while reducing environmental emissions.

For example, a trial in broilers shows the following results (Figure 1):

• Body weight gain (+1.3%)
• Feed intake (-0.7%)
• Feed conversion rate (-2.0%)

^{Figure 1: The average effect of selected phytogenic substances on body weight gain (BWG), feed intake (FI), feed conversion ratio (FCR) of broilers during a production period of at least 35 days. The non-supplement control was used as an internal reference in each trial (set at 100 %)}