Vet World   Vol.15   March-2022  Article-16

The public health issue of antibiotic residues in food and feed: Causes, consequences, and potential solutions

Background and Aim: Antibiotics are among the essential veterinary medicine compounds associated with animal feed and food animal production. The use of antibiotics for the treatment of bacterial infections is almost unavoidable, with less need to demonstrate their importance. Although banned as a growth factor for a few years, their use in animals can add residues in foodstuffs, presenting several environmental, technological, animal health, and consumer health risks. With regard to human health risks, antibiotic residues induce and accelerate antibiotic resistance development, promote the transfer of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to humans, cause allergies (penicillin), and induce other severe pathologies, such as cancers (sulfamethazine, oxytetracycline, and furazolidone), anaphylactic shock, nephropathy (gentamicin), bone marrow toxicity, mutagenic effects, and reproductive disorders (chloramphenicol). Antibiotic resistance, which has excessively increased over the years, is one of the adverse consequences of this phenomenon, constituting a severe public health issue, thus requiring the regulation of antibiotics in all areas, including animal breeding. This review discusses the common use of antibiotics in agriculture and antibiotic residues in food/feed. In-depth, we discussed the detection techniques of antibiotic residues, potential consequences on the environment and animal health, the technological transformation processes and impacts on consumer health, and recommendations to mitigate this situation.

Keywords: animal breeding, antibiotic resistance, antibiotics residues, food and feed, public health.

How to cite this article: Arsène MMJ, Davares AKL, Viktorovna PI, Andreevna SL, Sarra S, Khelifi I, Sergueïevna DM (2022) The public health issue of antibiotic residues in food and feed: Causes, consequences, and potential solutions, Veterinary World, 15(3): 662-671.

Received: 29-09-2021  Accepted: 08-02-2022     Published online: 23-03-2022

Corresponding author: Mbarga Manga Joseph Arsène   E-mail: josepharsenembarga@yahoo.fr

DOI: 10.14202/vetworld.2022.662-671

Copyright: Arsène MMJ, et al. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http:// creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.