In-feed probiotic versus sub-therapeutic antibiotics

摘要

There is growing legislation pressure to phase out the routine feeding of food animals with low level of antibiotics as feed additives. The European Union has already imposed a total ban of antibiotic growth promoters with effect from January 2006. Thus, alternative solutions should be evaluated in the meanwhile. Antimicrobials, when used as growth promoters, are claimed to improve daily gain by 3-9% and feed utilisation by 2-7%, with fewer scour problems. For this reason they are customarily used inpigs even on high health status farms. They appear to act by reducing the number of pathogenic bacteria and modifying the microflora in the gut, providing more nutrient availability for the animal itself and less substrate for the bacterial organisms to use for their own growth.