Organic-certified meats were 56 per cent per less likely to harbour multi-drug-resistant organisms, according to the findings by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The finding emerged from a study of nation-wide testing by the United States National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System between 2012 and 2017.
The study involved 39,348 meat samples, 1,422 of which were found to contain at least one multi-drug-resistant organism. The rate of contamination was four per cent in the conventionally produced meat samples and slightly less than one per cent in the organic meat samples.
The results are hardly surprising because organic production protocols ban the use of antibiotics.
