Antibiotic Resistance of Isolated from , , and Retail Broiler Chicken Meat.

The use of antibiotics for therapeutic and especially non-therapeutic purposes in livestock farms promotes the development of antibiotic resistance in previously susceptible bacteria through selective pressure. In this work, we examined isolates using the standard Kirby-Bauer disk diffusion susceptibility protocol and the CLSI standards. Companies selling retail chicken products in Los Angeles, California were grouped into three production groupings-, , and . is not a federally regulated category in the United States, but shows the reader that the chicken is incubated, hatched, raised, slaughtered, and packaged by one party, ensuring that the use of antibiotics in the entire production of the chicken is known and understood. We then examined the antibiotic resistance of the isolates ( = 325) by exposing them to seven common antibiotics, and resistance was seen to two of the antibiotics, ampicillin and erythromycin. As has been shown previously, it was found that for both ampicillin and erythromycin, there was no significant difference ( > 0.05) between and USDA (United States Department of Agriculture)-certified chicken. Unique to this work, we additionally found that chicken had fewer ( ≤ 0.05) antibiotic-resistant isolates than both of the previous. Although not considered clinically relevant, we chose to test erythromycin because of its ecological significance to the environmental antibiotic resistome, which is not generally done. To our knowledge, consumer chicken has not previously been studied for its antibiotic resistance. This work contributes to a better understanding of a potential strategy of chicken production for the overall benefit of human health, giving evidentiary support to the One Health approach implemented by the World Health Organization.