ALTERNATIVES TO THE USE OF ANTIBIOTICS IN PIG PRODUCTION
Probiotics, Prebiotics, Organic acids, Essencial oils, antibiotics.
Antimicrobials have been used for disease treatment, prevention and as growth promoters. Due to the irregular use of antimicrobials, there has been a growing concern about food safety due to the possibility of resistant bacterial strains and drug residues in pork. This scenario has motivated research with alternatives that enable the maintenance of animal health without compromising performance. Prebiotics, probiotics, organic acids and essential oils may be alternatives to using conventional antibiotics. The objective of this work was to evaluate the impact of substitution of antibiotics used in pig feed with alternative additives in nursery, growing and finishing pigs. The experiment initially used 1,101 weaned pigs divided into 38 pens with six treatments during nursery and in the growing and finishing stage, 850 animals remained. At weaning the animals were divided by sex (females and males), submitted to the vaccination protocol and weighed individually to achieve the homogeneous distribution among the 6 treatments, being T1: antibiotic free feed, T2: antibiotic feed, T3: prebiotic feed, T4: probiotic feed, T5: essential oil feed, T6: organic acid feed. At the nursery way out, the animals were second weighed to determine daily weight gain (DWG) and conversion rate (CR). During growing and finishing stage the animals were weighed individually four times. For laboratory analysis of immunoglobulins and microbiota, blood and feces samples were collected from 2 animals per pen, being 2 collections in nursery and 3 collections in growing and finishing stage, always in the same individuals from each pen, since the housing of nursery until the slaughter. Other data collected were: clinical occurrences, mortality, cough and sneezing rate and presence of diarrhea. At the slaughter house, the pneumonia and pleurisy index (PPI), gastric ulcer index and carcass typification were analyzed. The experiment has been completed and the final results and conclusions will still be obtained.