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Abstract The control of infectious diseases has always been a top medical priority. For years during the so-called antibiotic era, we enjoyed prolonged life expectancy and the benefits of superior pathogen control. The devastating failure of the medical system, agriculture and pharmaceutical companies and the general population to appreciate and safeguard these benefits is now leading us into a grim post-antibiotic era. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) refers to microorganisms becoming resistant to antibiotics that were designed and expected to kill them. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, AMR was recognised by the World Health Organization as the central priority area with growing public awareness of the threat AMR now presents. The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, a project commissioned by the UK government, predicted that the death toll of AMR could be one person every 3 seconds, amounting to 10 million deaths per year by 2050. This review aims to raise awareness of the evergrowing extensiveness of antimicrobial resistance and identify major sources of this adversity, focusing on agriculture’s role in this problem and its solutions. Keypoints • Widespread development of antibiotic resistance is a major global health risk. • Antibiotic resistance is abundant in agricultural produce, soil, food, water, air and probiotics. • New approaches are being developed to control and reduce antimicrobial resistance.

The therapeutic properties of anti-hypertensive medications that extend beyond blood pressure lowering have started to become important clinical targets in recent years. This study aimed to assess the cardioprotective effects of perindopril in attenuating complications associated with metabolic syndrome in diet induced obese rats.Male Wistar-Kyoto (WKY) rats aged 16 weeks were fed either standard rat chow (SC) or given a high-fat-high-carbohydrate (HFHC) diet for 20 weeks. Perindopril treatment (1 mg/kg/day) was administered to a subset of WKY rats commencing at week 8 of the 20 week HFHC feeding period. Body weights, food, water and energy intakes, blood pressure, heart rate and glucose tolerance were measured throughout the treatment period. Oxidative stress and inflammatory markers, lipid levels, cardiac collagen deposition, vascular function, aortic and cardiac electrical function were examined after the treatment.WKY rats developed metabolic syndrome after 20 weeks of HFHC feeding, evidenced by the presence of abdominal obesity, dyslipidaemia, glucose intolerance and hypertension. Perindopril treatment prevented the development of obesity and hypertension in WKY-HFHC. Perindopril improved blood lipid profiles in HFHC rats with decreases in LDL cholesterol, triglycerides and total cholesterol. Type I collagen levels were decreased in WKY-HFHC rats along with decreases in left ventricle mass. Perindopril treated rats also showed improved cardiac electrical function indicated by decreases in action potential at 90 % of repolarisation in WKY-HFHC rats.These results show that perindopril has a profound effect on preventing the development of metabolic syndrome in animals fed a HFHC diet.

Consumer push towards open and free-range production systems makes biosecurity on farms challenging, leading to increased disease and animal welfare issues. Phytogenic products are increasingly becoming a viable alternative for the use of antibiotics in livestock production. Here we present a study of the effects of commercial phytogenic supplement containing menthol, carvacrol and carvone on intestinal microbiota of layer hens, microbial functional capacity, and intestinal morphology. A total of 40,000 pullets were randomly assigned to two sides of the experimental shed. Growth performance, mortality, egg production and egg quality parameters were recorded throughout the trial period (18–30 weeks of age). Microbial community was investigated using 16S amplicon sequencing and functional difference using metagenomic sequencing. Phytogen supplemented birds had lower mortality and number of dirty eggs, and their microbial communities showed reduced richness. Although phytogen showed the ability to control the range of poultry pathogens, its action was not restricted to pathogenic taxa, and it involved functional remodelling the intestinal community towards increased cofactor production, heterolactic fermentation and salvage and recycling of metabolites. The phytogen did not alter the antimicrobial resistance profile or the number of antibiotic resistance genes. The study indicates that phytogenic supplementation can mimic the action of antibiotics in altering the gut microbiota and be used as their alternative in industry-scale layer production.

Pathogen control is a critical issue in the layer industry. Plant-based natural products are firmly replacing the undesirable use of antibiotics in animal production. The poultry industry embraced the opportunity to distance itself from the negative public perception of antibiotic use. In this study, we investigated the effects of a phytogenic product comprising of menthol, carvacrol and carvone on ileum gene expression profile in layers after 16 weeks of continual supplementation. Phytogen supplementation increased endocytosis and autophagy while showing significant predicted cardiovascular protective effects. Statistical comparison with over 100,000 manually curated and comparably reanalysed public datasets suggests that the phytogen effects are highly significantly comparable with transcriptomic effects of clinical antibiotics doxycycline and geldanamycin, and that phytogen can reverse transcriptomic effects of a range of viral diseases and malaria. Our data confirmed the hypothesis that similarly to the original essential oil type antimicrobial constituents of phytogenic products, there may be a range of benefits unrelated to their critical antimicrobial action, contributing to improved bird welfare.