Oh Gee, Another Terrible Consequence Of Antibiotics In Farm Animals

In case you weren’t already convinced that overuse of antibiotics in livestock is a bad, bad, bad idea — a recent study offers a new reason to scale back on them: climate change. An international research team found that dung from cattle treated with a commonly used antibiotic gives off more than double the methane of antibiotic-free dung. Their work was published Thursday in the science journal Proceedings Of the Royal Society B. Scientists tested dung from 10 cows. Five of the cows received a three-day course of broad-spectrum antibiotic tetracycline, and five received none, Phys.org reports. They then measured the dung's outputs of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, and found that the antibiotic course “consistently increased methane emissions.” Right now, the researchers aren’t sure exactly why the antibiotics have this effect.  They also found that the antibiotics changed the types of microorganisms living within dung beetles that fed on the dung. That finding is important because it indicates that giving livestock antibiotics can affect wildlife and not just the "target animal," lead author Tobin Hammer told The Huffington Post in an email. “In this case, dung beetle size and numbers were not affected -- which is good, because these beetles are ecologically important,” Hammer said. However, it’s possible the drugs could influence the beetles in other ways that researchers didn’t examine, like behavior. H...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news