Development of Sustainable, Non-Antibiotic Alternatives for Disease Control in Commerical Poultry

NON-TECHNICAL SUMMARY: Recent public concern and the public fear of a possible return to untreatable human disease outbreaks has brought intense scrutiny of anti-microbil use in food production animals. If food animal production efficiency is to keep pace with the demands of a growing global population, cost-effective and non-chemical alternatives for enteric pathogen control are needed. The purpose of the project is the development of therapeutically efficacious competitive exclusion cultures and bacteriophage selection technologies for use in poultry flocks.

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APPROACH: Develop and validate novel and rapid in vitro techniques for identification,isolation, and characterization of individual bacterial species from the lower chicken gastrointestinal tract that can exclude selected enteric pathogens by either competition for nutrients or local production of microbial toxins. Evaluate and optimize application methodologies for administering identified competitive exclusion cultures in growing chickens with regard to chick performance and specific pathogen exclusion. Develop techniques for rapid isolation and biological characterization of bacteriophages which aggressively attack selected enteric poultry pathogens. Determine predictive characteristics of bacteriophages which effectively limit or eliminate specific bacterial pathogens in the poultry gastrointestinal tract.

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PROGRESS: 2001/05 TO 2006/09 <BR>
During the life of this project, more than eight graduate students were trained, and more than 30 related manuscripts were published relating to sustainable alternatives to antibiotics. This project has been recently renewed as a new project with goals of continuing our progress. Of significance was the identification of probiotic cultures that were successfully commercialized and have been shown to improve performance and to control idiopathic diarrhea in poultry while reducing Salmonella infection rates in live pre-slaughter poultry. Bacteriophage studies have similarly led to patented technologies that have been recently acquired by commercial interests. Taken together, this projects has been a highly successful one, with considerable credit given to the entire program. The investigators feel that the upcoming project will continue to impact this important area as antibiotic choices are becoming more and more restricted and as cost-effective solutions for antemortem control of food-borne pathogens becomes a high priority for both industry and governmental regulators.
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IMPACT: 2001/05 TO 2006/09<BR>
These discoveries may provide new cost-effective opportunities for the replacement of certain antibiotics from use in commercial poultry and also for reducing the impact of poultry-borne causes of food-borne illness in humans.