Enterobacteria: Antibiotic resistance found in wild rodents

Resistance to antibiotics is an increasingly common problem in both veterinary and human medicine, and its management is the subject of urgent debate. Efforts to reduce this resistance are based on the assumption that it is maintained in bacterial populations as a result of exposure to antibiotics, and that restricting the use of antibiotics should therefore restrain the spread of resistance. But we have found that antibiotic resistance is prevalent in populations of wild rodents that have not been exposed to antibiotics, indicating that approaches to control it based on this assumption may be overoptimistic.

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