Antibiotics are used in animal livestock production for therapeutic treatment of disease and at subtherapeutic levels for growth promotion and improvement of feed efficiency. It is estimated that approximately 75% of antibiotics are not absorbed by animals and are excreted in waste. Antibiotic resistance selection occurs among gastrointestinal bacteria, which are also excreted in manure and sto...

C. Power1,2, R. Sayers3, B. O’Brien3, A. Furey2, M. Danaher4 and K. Jordan1† 1Food Safety Department, Teagasc Food Research Centre, Moorepark, Fermoy, Co. Cork, Ireland 2Team Elucidate, Department of Chemistry, Cork Institute of Technology, Bishopstown, Cork, Ireland 3Teagasc Animal and Grassland Research and Innovation Centre, Moorepark, Fermoy, Co. Cork, Ireland 4Food Safety Department, Teaga...

For the first time the use of a porous microresonator placed in a microelectrofluidic system for integrated functions of nanofiltration and sensing of small biomolecules and chemical analytes in extremely dilute solution was proposed and investigated. As an example, aminoglycosides in drug residues in food and livestock products were considered as the trace chemical analyte. The filtration proc...

The aim of this work was to study possibilities of using microbiological broadspectrum inhibitor test (Delvotest T) for express estimation of antibiotic residues in bovine milk. For quantitative estimation the waste-milk samples were stepwise diluted (dilution array) by antibiotic-free milk until negative test result was achieved. Another objective was to evaluate heat treatment efficiency of w...

Imidacloprid is a neonicotinoid pesticide heavily used by the agricultural industry and shown to have negative impacts on honey bees above certain concentrations. We evaluated the effects of different imidacloprid concentrations in sugar syrup using cage and field studies, and across different environments. Honey bee colonies fed sublethal concentrations of imidicloprid (0, 5, 20 and 100 ppb) o...

— This paper uses a large database of laboratory test results to investigate the sources of international variation in pesticide residues on food products. We specify and estimate a model that incorporates contamination effects attributable to product pest sensitivity, pesticide toxicity levels and characteristics of the producing country. Among the latter, our model tests for the effects of in...

The thioredoxin system, comprising thioredoxin (Trx), thioredoxin reductase (TrxR) and NADPH, is one of the major cellular antioxidant systems, implicated in a large and growing number of biological functions. Trx acts as an oxidoreductase via a highly conserved dithiol/disulfide motif located in the active site ( Trp-Cys-Gly-Pro- Cys-Lys-). Different factors are involved in the regulation of T...

BACKGROUND The social and medical problems of drug abuse are a matter of increasing global concern. To tackle drug abuse in changing scenarios, international drug agencies need fresh methods to monitor trends and patterns of illicit drug consumption. OBJECTIVE We tested a sewage epidemiology approach, using levels of excreted drug residues in wastewater, to monitor collective use of the major...

Block of human ether-a-go-go related gene (HERG) K(+) channels by a variety of medications has been linked to acquired long QT syndrome, a disorder of cardiac repolarization that predisposes to lethal arrhythmias. The drug-binding site is composed of residues that face into the central cavity of the channel. Two aromatic residues located on the S6 domain (Tyr652 and Phe656) are particularly imp...

Although bats are reported as being threatened by pesticides, they are currently not considered in European Union pesticide risk assessments. The reason for that contradiction is probably related to the scarcity of information on bat activity in pesticide-treated fields and the pesticide residues on their food items. The authors recorded bat activity and measured pesticide residues on bat-speci...