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LOW levels of dietary antibiotics stimulate growth of young chicks, improve the efficiency of food utilization, and reduce the weight of the small intestine. (For reviews of the early literature see Jukes, 1957; Luckey, 1959). This growth response to antibiotics is due to inhibition of harmful intestinal bacteria, since antibiotics do not stimulate growth of germfree animals (Forbes and Park, 1959) or of animals in a clean environment (Coates et al., 1951) and since a poorly absorbed antibiotic such as bacitracin is a potent growth-stimulating agent (Matterson and Singsen, 1952). The antibiotic growth response in chicks is most pronounced when the animals are fed a casein-sucrose diet (Stokstad et al., 1953). In previous papers (Eyssen and De Somer, 1963a, b) we reported that the slow growth rate of chicks on the casein-sucrose diet without antibiotics is due to a transitory enteric infection which causes malabsorption of nutrients from about …
Eyssen et al. (1967) studied this question.