Superbug risk from farming medicines
Healthy animals ‘shouldn’t be given antibiotics’
DANGEROUS new superbugs are being created by f armers routinely giving antibiotics to perfectly healthy animals, it is claimed today.
Health minister Anna Soubry has now called on farmers, vets and drug companies to put a stop to the policy in order to protect human health.
Livestock are often given antibiotics whether or not they are unwell as a preventative measure to stop diseases from spreading, but the bugs are increasingly developing resistance to the drugs.
If these superbugs then infect humans through food poisoning, the health consequences can be severe – even fatal – as doctors find the medicines they normally use do not work.
Last year, Cambridge scientists found a superbug version of MRSA in milk that had also been found i n pigs, and it is thought the use of antibiotics on farms has been responsible for the emergence of a superbug version of E.coli that has been associated with more than 50 deaths. Miss Soubry has written to mini sters at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs ( Defra), demanding that the preventative – also known as prophylactic – use of antibiotics should be outlawed. She said: ‘The routine prophylactic use of antibiotics is not acceptable practice.’
Last week, Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies warned that the emergence of superbugs is one of the key dangers facing modern medicine. She said: ‘If we don’t act now, any one of us could go into hospital in 20 years for minor surgery and die because of an ordinary infection that can’t be treated by antibiotics.’
The Department of Health is already putting pressure on GPs to reduce antibiotic prescriptions for patients, but it also wants tougher controls on their use in farm animals.
Miss Soubry’s stance was backed by the Soil Association, which supports organic farming.
Richard Young, its policy expert, said: ‘We are very grateful to the minister for clarifying the Government’s position and trust that Defra will now move quickly to ensure that the routine use of antibiotics in healthy animals is phased out, in order to slow the spread of antibiotic resistance on farms.’
Current Defra policy authorises the use of antibiotics in healthy animals, although not as a substitute for good farm management and animal husbandry systems.
The Veterinary Medicines Directorate, which issues guidance for the department, said: ‘This authorisation includes the treatment of animals at heightened risk of infection when not all have developed clinical signs of the disease.’
Drug companies and farmers have formed an organisation, the Responsible Use of Medicines in Agriculture Alliance, which insists the use of antibiotics is necessary.
It said: ‘Allowing animals to become ill and then treating them is not considered good practice. Such a practice in human medicine would be considered negligent, and the same consideration applies to animals at risk.’