KEY POINTS:
A Christchurch teenager's school science project which found multiple antibiotic-resistant bugs in fresh store-bought chicken backs up international studies.
Jane Millar, a former pupil at St Margaret's College, made the discovery last year during research for an International Baccalaureate Diploma.
Her findings - that the chicken contained bacteria that had developed resistance to gentamicin and tonramycin, antibiotics not used in the poultry industry here but important for treating infections in humans - are expected to generate considerable interest worldwide.
A similar study in the US, where gentamicin is used, found the presence of high-level gentamicin-resistant bugs in 44 per cent of retail chicken products. High levels were also found in human stool samples.
Other studies, both in New Zealand and overseas, have found that up to 90 per cent of poultry on supermarket shelves carries other antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as campylobacter and salmonella. Millar said the resistant bacteria could live in the human intestinal tract and easily transfer their resistances to other bugs, resulting in superbugs.
Debbie Morris, of the New Zealand Food Safety Authority, said a new poultry monitoring strategy was being developed. But she said New Zealand did not have four of the main poultry diseases of overseas.
