Poultry Feed Sampling

Sampling was the first, and quality-determining, stage of the antibiotic-resistance study: poultry feed was collected aseptically from selected retail vendors across the Ogbete and Abakpa markets in Enugu. Vendors and sampling points were chosen to give material that was representative of feed actually reaching poultry in the area, and each sample was handled under sterile conditions and transported appropriately to preserve the microbial community for downstream isolation. Careful, structured sampling matters because any contamination or bias introduced here would propagate through every later step, from isolation to susceptibility testing. Treating collection as a controlled experimental step, rather than convenience sampling, is what makes the resulting resistance data interpretable.