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. 2018 Jul 31;49:68. doi: 10.1186/s13567-018-0558-2

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© The Author(s) 2018

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

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The outer circle represents all infectious diseases in livestock. A large proportion of these (namely bacterial infections) can be controlled by antibiotics (grey circle). Some of those can also be controlled by alternative methods such as management measures (blue circle) and/or vaccination (yellow circle). Both of these methods can also be used to control a number of non-bacterial infections not targeted by antibiotics. A significant number of bacterial infectious diseases still remain controllable by antibiotics only, however. We suggest in this review that many of these may be controlled by non-vaccine immune methods, which, given adequate efficiency and low cost may in addition be applicable to some of the infectious diseases that can be handled by management and/or vaccination. As indicated a need for antibiotics will persist. Anyhow, presently available alternative methods can drastically reduce their total consumption and their frequency of use.