Feeding Antibiotics To Livestock May Trigger More Climate Change

A new study claims that feeding antibiotics to livestock can cause climate damage. This contributes to the increasing calls for farmers to avoid giving their animals antibiotics. 

This is not the first time that farmers are asked to refrain from feeding antibiotics to livestock. However, this is the first time that feeding antibiotics to farm animals has been linked to global warming, as reported by NBC News.

The new study established the relationship between antibiotics to farm animals and climate change by looking at the manure of the animals.

According to the researchers, when cattle are fed with a common antibiotic, the manure they produced contains more methane than usual. This then become a potent global warning gas!

The team claimed that the manure produced by cattle that consumed the antibiotics would have more methane because the bacteria competing with methane producing microbes are killed off by the medicines. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report of antibiotics increasing methane emissions," the team wrote in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. 

Another member of the team, Tobin Hammer of the University of Colorado, claimed that their results only add to the growing literature highlighting the negative consequences of antibiotics. Previous studies have highlighted that while antibiotics make animals grow faster ad bigger, this practice triggered the rise in antibiotic-resistant superbugs. 

"We know that there are negative consequences of antibiotics, particularly this effect of antibiotic resistance," said Hammer. "But this was a pretty unexpected link between antibiotics and this other important environmental issue that we care about - greenhouse gases," he added.

Earlier this month, the Food and Drug Administration started to require drug manufacturers to estimate how much of the antibiotics they sell in the US are being fed to food-producing farm animals, as reported by the Pig Site. "This information will further enhance FDA's ongoing activities related to slowing the development of antimicrobial resistance to help ensure that safe and effective antimicrobial new animal drugs will remain available for use in human and animal medicine," said Dr William T. Flynn, DVM, MS, deputy director for science policy in the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. 

It now remains to be seen what FDA will do with the newest findings that antibiotics given to farm animals contributes to global warming.