Animal antibiotics are a health hazard

Overuse Of Antibiotics In Primary Care was the heading of the editorial in The Times of April 16: "However, research in the past decade has clearly shown that antibiotic overuse is a major public health problem". "Excessive use of antibiotic leads to antibiotic resistance..." The article went on to blame both patient and doctor factors.

It ended up by saying that it will take a very concerted effort by patients, doctors, etc... to improve the prevailing situation. What struck me most in this editorial was the fact that no mention was made of the treatment of the food we eat. After the manmade catastrophe of BSE, one might suppose that the meat industry would try to avoid the threat to human health. Yet today, we risk what scientists describe as "catastrophic" consequences because of the way farm animals are reared.

The intensive production of poultry means that most chickens are pumped full of antibiotics not simply to fight disease but to enhance growth.

Antibiotic resistant organisms have developed and been transferred to humans through the food chain.

The public is paying a heavy price for this farming "efficiency". A report from the Advisory Committee on the micro biological safety of food warns that there is now a real danger of drug-resistant diseases.

There should be no surprise in all this. For decades it has been well understood that antibiotics - perhaps the greatest miracle of modern times - have to be used as sparingly as possible, in order to reduce resistant strains of disease. But in intensive agriculture that lesson has all too often been shrugged off.

It must be said that such irresponsibility has fallen out of fashion. The meat industry has also awoken to the dangers. Europe too has stopped the sale of wildly used growth promoters. However, farmers have switched to another drug to replace banned products. This drug is very similar to a drug used in hospitals overseas.

The government has to keep a lookout and impose tighter controls over the way meat is produced. The demand for cheap meat is one thing. But if it reduces our ability to fight disease, it may yet prove the most ruinously expensive choice we could have made.

At least one would have expected a mention that human folly knows no limits over the treatment of the food we eat and the consequences!