![]() ![]() The team published its work in October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. The researchers unexpectedly found that soil bacteria carrying antibiotic-resistant genes became more abundant when they were grown with the manure than when they were grown with synthetic nitrogen-based fertilizer-even though the cows were drug-free. In this case, the manure specifically came from cows that were not treated with antibiotics. To tease out how those antibiotic-resistant bacteria come to exist, Handelsman and her colleagues at Yale University added manure from a nearby Connecticut farm to raised beds of soil in 2013. In addition to nutrients, that fragrant fertilizer may harbor antibiotic-resistant bacteria-a problem because the microbes can come into contact with plants that are subsequently shipped to supermarkets and sometimes eaten raw. Jo Handelsman is tracing one such pathway that, as she puts it, travels from “barn to table.” Handelsman, a microbiologist who is now associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, looked into dairy cows, which are often treated with antibiotics and produce manure that farmers use on their crops. Amid debates over what kinds of restrictions should be put in place, figuring out how antibiotic-resistant bacteria evolve and make their way to humans remains an area of intense interest. ![]() Now scientists know that the overuse of antibiotics in livestock can foster drug-resistant bacteria that are dangerous to human health. When antibiotics first became available, farmers used them indiscriminately-dribbling streptomycin into chicken feed to boost growth and doling out low doses to fatten pigs. ![]()
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