We take antibiotics for granted. We rely upon them to treat infections caused by bacteria. They’re among the most frequently prescribed drugs we take. But their use also creates opportunities for resistant bacteria to develop. This is why antibiotics should be prescribed only when they’re necessary. Like most, if not all, medications, their misuse has important, even life-threatening consequences.
Take, for example, the prescription of low-level doses of antibiotics for intensively farmed animals. These drugs are not to treat specific sick animals but entire populations of chickens or pigs. Antibiotics are routinely given because of their stressful, unsanitary, overcrowded and confined conditions. They’re often physiologically stretched to the limit to maximise productivity. In short, factory farmed animals are inevitably at high risk of infection.
The antibiotics are given as a pre-emptive move to prevent and control bacterial infections. If these animals were not kept in factory farms but instead outdoors in humane and sustainable conditions, this indiscriminate use of antibiotics would not be necessary.
Farm animal welfare and the use of antibiotics is an issue that is not only the concern of Compassion. It is also the concern of our friends at the Soil Association and Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming.
Earlier this year, I wrote here about how we came together to form the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics. Together we aim to halt the routine use of antibiotics in farmed animals.
Today, I want to bring you up to date with the latest developments, particularly our new report, ‘Case Study of a Health Crisis’.
Our report shows that over-use of antibiotics in factory farming, especially at low doses over several days, is contributing to the huge threat of a world without effective cures for bacterial infections. We set out the evidence that:
• Farm animals are breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant strains of Salmonella, Campylobacter and E. coli;
• Farm animals harbour antibiotic-resistant strains of MRSA that could become virulent;
and has contributed to:
• Diminishing effectiveness in human medicine of critically important antibiotics such as cephalosporins.
The Report’s Foreword is written by Professor Christopher Butler, Head of the Institute of Primary Care and Public Health at Cardiff University and Dean of Research in the School of Medicine. He writes that the challenge is to ‘reserve antibiotics for those who will achieve meaningful clinical benefit and to keep them away from those who are unlikely to benefit’.
We want EU-wide action to reduce the use of non-therapeutic antibiotics in farm animals. We want a target to reduce overall antibiotic use on EU farms by 50% by 2015. This should go hand-in-hand with specific controls on the use in livestock of ‘critically important’ human antibiotics.
To be clear, we thoroughly believe in the use of antibiotics to treat genuine illness in farm animals. But to use antibiotics as a pre-emptive measure, a tool to prop-up an otherwise unhealthy and unsustainable system, is simply unacceptable.
This report is available free to download. Please visit now our Save Our Antibiotics campaign page on our web site.
Professor Butler speaks of the need for ‘Antibiotic Stewardship’ to ‘preserve the precious reservoir of antibiotic susceptibility that humanity has left to it’.
It’s something we need urgently. If we don’t, then factory farming will not only continue to cause unimaginable suffering to farm animals, it will also threaten the future of our antibiotics; and with it, our own health and well-being.
Absolutely spot on.