.> The medicated feeds serve two purposes. One is that farm ers have found that animals (fish are an exception) fed on antibiotics early in life grow big ger and better than animals that are not. Scientists do not yet fully understand why this happens, but animal growers love the effect..> Second, modern husbandry techniques require that massive populations of animals be pen ned, cooped or pooled in one spot to save labor and speed efficiency. To protect the densely packed animals (Including fish) from diseases that could spread easily under such conditions, farmers feed them antibiotics. Diseases are prevented before they begin.
....> The problem gets more complex. Ten years ago Dr. Watan abe discovered that in a few types of bacteria one organism may acquire resistance to one or more antibiotics simply from contact with another resistant strain of bacteria. He called it transferable drug resistance..> What happens is that certain bacteria, in gaining resistance to drugs, develop small bits of genetic material (called epi somes) within their cell walls. These small bits are called R (for resistance) factors. And it is now known that bacteria can pass these R factors easily from one type of bacteria to another. Thus a strain of bacteria can become resistant to drugs with out ever being exposed to anti biotics; it simply needs to come into contact with a strain that has R factors. #RFactor #episome #plasmid
