India, July 29 -- Industrial chicken farming is helping the spread of Campylobacter, the world's most common bacterial cause of diarrhea, according to a new study.
"As the chicken population has exploded, they've increasingly picked up strains from different wild birds and become a cauldron of bacterial evolution," said senior author Prof Sam Sheppard of the University of Oxford. "Lots of strains come together and hybridise. We do not want that, because that's where new Frankenstein monster bugs emerge."
Researchers from the University of Oxford's Ineos Oxford Institute for Antimicrobial Research found that as chicken farming has grown, the exchange of Campylobacter strains between wild birds and chickens has increased sharply. This allow...