Antibiotics are routinely used on North
American swine farms and are administered
in the form of medicated water or as feed
additives. The addition of antimicrobial
products to nursery feeds is especially
effective with typical improvements in
growth rates and feed conversion efficiencies
of up to 16% and 6%, respectively.2
Industry surveys suggest that more than
82% of U.S. swine farms with nursery pigs
use antimicrobial feed additives in diet formulations.
3 And although few experiments
have been conducted to assess effects on
performance, suckling pigs on more than
44% of all operations are routinely given
injectable antibiotics during post-farrowing
processing or at weaning for prophylactic
and treatment purposes