Most owners forget that antibiotics are drugs, and, if misused, they can cause short- and long-term problems for horses and, potentially, humans.

Growing up in an era of modern medicine, the availability of antibiotics has been taken for granted. How often have you been asked if you are taking antibiotics for a cough or a sniffle? How many times have you seen a horse being administered antibiotics for a nonspecific fever or for a relatively superficial wound?

Antibiotics have been impressive tools for improving health, yet they also pose one of the most pressing public health problems facing the medical community today. With increased antibiotic use comes increasing emergence of resistant strains of bacteria; such bacteria have developed ways to avoid being eliminated by drugs.

Some organisms that infect animals also infect people, and these bacteria make no distinction between types of mammalian tissue; to bacteria, it is a warm body with nutrients to support growth and multiplication of their numbers. And, similar antibiotics are used in many animal species and in people. The more exposure bacteria have to antibiotics, the more opportunities there are to develop drug resistance, with the potential for disastrous consequences: humans with serious infections can die, and in the veterinary world, there might be treatment failure or life-threatening diarrhea in horses