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Reporter: Agnes Cusack
MARK COLVIN: The CSIRO has just made a breakthrough in food technology that could reap millions.

CSIRO scientists believe they've found the key to ending the use of antibiotics in the poultry industry, while still keeping the chickens, and their meat, healthy.

The widespread use of antibiotics in chicken meat has raised concerns about the spread of "super-bugs," diseases that become resistant to antibiotics and could infect people.

Agnes Cusack reports.

AGNES CUSACK: Australians consume 400 hundred million chickens a year, 40 billion are eaten worldwide, almost half the meat we eat is chicken. Fo the past 30 years, chickens have been pumped with antibiotics in the belief the drugs would control bacterial infections, producing healthy, plump birds.

But recent studies in Denmark have shown the benefit of antibiotics have been marginal, in fact, the drugs have thrown up a new danger, with the development with an antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can be transferred from the chickens to humans.

Peter Collingon, is the Director of Infectious and Microbiology at the Canberra Hospital.

DR PETER COLLINGON: Partly, we're using large volumes of antibiotics in animals, particularly poultry as growth promoters, in fact, there's more total antibiotics used in animals than is used in humans.

One of the problems with using antibiotics is that antibiotic-resistant bacteria can develop and these can come through to people in the food chain and some of these bugs may be "super bugs", in other words, we may not have effective therapy to treat them.

So any alternative to using antibiotics to keep chickens healthy or also even to let them grow a bit faster, is worth looking at.

AGNES CUSACK: A CSIRO livestock research team believes it has developed a viable alternative. For the past 10 years, it's been using cytochines, proteins produced naturally in the body, to improve the immune response in chickens and help combat disease.

Dr Mike Johnston says chickens treated with cytochines are healthier and quick to fatten up. And Dr Johnson says the cytochines won't infect humans.

DR MIKE JOHNSTON: Well the cytochines are naturally produced by an animal and they're very short acting. So the production of the cytochine in the body does its job and then it's broken down extremely quickly.

And in the system that we're using, which is the cytochine being delivered by a virus, the same sort of thing happens. The Virus delivers the gene producing the cytochine, the cytochine is produced, does its job, but then the virus and everything else is then eliminated by the immune system itself.

So at the end of the day, there's nothing there, there's no virus and no gene producing the cytochine. You're only left with an animal which has an enhanced immune response.

AGNES CUSACK: The CSIRO is working with a large international pharmaceutical company to test the new treatment for European and American markets.

Peter Collingon says concerns such as genetic modification need to be thoroughly investigated.

DR PETER COLLINGON: There's a lot of genetic modification that occurs just with natural selection in animals and with bacteria and viruses all the time, some good, some bad.

That is why it is important with any process, particularly with a new process like this, that there is appropriate evaluation done with people with expertise, who are truly independent from any financial, if you like, benefits from the process itself. But my understanding in Australia, at least we have some processes in place to do that and one would presume that government agencies will make sure that that does occur, not only now, but in the future.