Archived press release

FOE SUPPORTS EU PROPOSAL TO BAN ANTIBIOTIC ANIMAL FEED

19 December 1996

Over 25 years ago Government advisors recommended that antibiotics used in human medicine should not be used as growth-promoters for livestock and only be administered to animals on veterinary prescription [1]. Since that time, despite acceptance of the Swann Committee's findings, bacterial resistance to antibiotics has spread. Recent research found that bacteria exposed to antibiotics used on farms have apparently not only developed resistance to associated antibiotics, but also passed that on to other microorganisms [2].

Robin Maynard, Agricultural Spokesperson for Friends of the Earth, said:
"The routine use of antibiotics in intensive livestock units is the pharmaceutical crutch for unsustainable and inhumane practices. Without their routine use, there's no way that farmers could crowd so many animals together in a confined space. Now it seems that this abuse of antibiotics is rebounding on humans. Yet again the myth that intensive farming produces 'cheap' food is being exposed."

Notes to Editors
The EU has proposed to ban the use of Avoparcin from April 1997. Avoparcin is widely used as an in-feed antibiotic for poultry, pigs, cattle, and lambs.

[1] The Joint Committee on the Use of Antibiotics in Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine, Chairman Professor Michael Swann, 1969, was formed following an epidemic of salmonella transferred from calves to humans, which resulted in several children dying after failing to respond to antibiotic treatment.

[2] Researchers at the John Radcliffe Memorial Hospital, Oxford, investigating an outbreak of antibiotic resistant bacteria in the renal unit, tracked the resistant bugs back to sewage outfalls, uncooked chickens , and farm animals. They concluded that, "It is therefore interesting that in this study vancomycin-resistant enterococcii faecium were isolated from a selection of farm animals and the carcasses of uncooked chickens."

Farm animals as a putative reservoir for vancomycin resistant enterococcal infection in man',Janice Bates, J. Zoe Jordens, and David T. Griffiths, Journal of Antimicrobial Chemistry (19940,34, 507 -516).
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