The mucky sediment below fish farms usually teems with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The presence of such bacteria is a cause of increasing concern because resistance can limit the ability to fight diseases, but it is also not that surprising: pisciculturalists have a long history of dosing fish they are breeding and rearing with antibiotics. […] The genes had to be getting into the bacteria somehow; one possible pathway was through antibiotic-resistance genes in fish food mingling in various ways with bacteria in the sediment.
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[A]nalysis revealed that of the five products, the one with the highest concentration of residual antibiotics was a fishmeal from Russia. It contained 54 nanograms of antibiotics per gram of food, although it had only eight resistance genes present. In contrast, a fishmeal from Peru had just 16 nanograms of antibiotics per gram of food, but carried a disturbing 41 resistance genes.…
The discovery of fish food as a source of resistance genes migrating into oceanic bacteria is worrying, and the researchers say more work is needed to determine if these resistance traits can find their way into the human food chain.
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