Antibiotics and Food Safety in Aquaculture

• Published in: Journal of agricultural and food chemistry Vol. 68; no. 43; pp. 11908 - 11919
• Main Authors: Chen, Jiemin, Sun, Runxia, Pan, Changgui, Sun, Yue, Mai, Bixian, Li, Qing X
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 28.10.2020
• Subjects: Animals; Anti-Bacterial Agents - analysis; Aquaculture; Drug Resistance; Fishes; Food Contamination - analysis; Food Safety; Humans; food safety; aquaculture; antibiotics
• ISSN: 0021-8561; 1520-5118
• DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.0c03996

Antibiotics are widely used in aquaculture. Intensive farming drives indiscriminate use of antibiotics, which results in residues of antibiotics in cultured aquatic products and bacterial resistance. This perspective attempts to present a brief update on usage, regulations, residues, and potential human health risk of antibiotics used in aquaculture. Through the comprehensive literature review, we provide a view that the safety of aquatic products still requires further attention and more rigorous risk assessment. Finally, we make a few suggestions for future research directions: reduce the use of antibiotics to bring down the speed of resistance development and monitor resistant pathogens and genes, strictly manage the environmental sanitation of aquaculture and pay attention to the quality of water bodies introduced into aquaculture, seek international cooperation to establish an information bank of antibiotic residues and antibiotic-resistant genes, and set up a quantitative model to assess the risk of antibiotic resistance associated with the antibiotic residues.