New antibiotic regulations coming into effect next year will require pig producers to get their prescriptions from a vet.
“There’s a lot of emphasis on veterinary oversight in the new regulations,” said Peter Provis, swine veterinary technical consultant for Elanco Animal Health.
“The use of medically important antibiotics for growth promotion will no longer be permitted, and all the other antibiotics will require a prescription,” Provis said during the Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium held in Saskatoon earlier this year.
“That’s not very far away, and there’s a lot of work and hurdles to overcome.”
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The new regulations come into effect in December 2017, but the timeline has already been pushed back from its originally scheduled December launch.
However, there continues to be confusion around the issue of antibiotic resistance and animal agriculture; public health is driving the global attention and policy changes.
“The use of antibiotics are being taken very seriously by OIE, (World Organization for Animal Health), FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) and WHO, (World Health Organization)which are really agencies of the United Nations,” he said.
“Really, all of the attention lately and concern is about the fact that there’s potential, and it’s happened that there is the ability to transfer resistance from antibiotics in our livestock sector or in our companion animals to other bacteria that may potentially cause problems in humans.”
Modern medicine did not create antibiotic resistance, which is in fact an ancient phenomenon.
“Lots of work shows that if they go up into the Arctic and access soil and different things that have not had any contact with people for 50,000 years, that they can find the ability for these bacteria to be resistant,” he said.
“That’s not surprising because the antibiotics in the world are truly natural compounds that we’ve found and purified.”
However, their widespread use and overuse has led to resistance being magnified in the environment.
“All of these resistance genes and bacteria will circulate be-tween human medicine, animal husbandry, plant production, aquaculture and the environment,” he said.
“As they circulate, they accumulate and hence the problem.”
The federal government has outlined a broad strategy. Areas of focus include surveillance, stewardship and innovation.
The use of growth promoters has become “a dirty word in the public’s eye,” but Provis questioned whether they are needed as hog health continues to improve.
“In the last 10 or so years, there has been pretty good evidence to suggest that the use of antibiotic growth promoters in livestock feed is not working as good as it once was,” he said.
“Now that you administer antibiotics to pigs that are healthy, they don’t have a large impact in terms of their growth. This has caused a lot of people to stand back and say, ‘maybe we don’t need to be using antibiotics the way that we have.’ That’s a good news story in light of the changes that are coming at us.”
Harvey Wagner of SaskPork agreed that tighter controls using direct veterinary supervision will minimize and even stop the misuse of antibiotics while strengthening the industry’s farm food safety program.
“Hopefully it will eliminate a lot of the errors made by people making the wrong assumptions or ‘if a little is good, a lot is better,’ that kind of stuff,” said Wagner.
“That means that the vet has to have been on the farm, know what’s happening on the farm, understand the health status of the animals on the farm and know if something’s amiss. Then they can prescribe and be involved in the treatment regime.”
However, Wagner said antibiotics will remain part of farming operations as new antibiotic alternatives are explored.
“We have to treat animals from time to time when there’s bacterial illness,” he said.
“It’s a matter of proper animal welfare. It’s also a question of food safety. If the animals are sick, you have to deal with it. You just can’t let sick animals be there.”
Added Provis: “No one’s going to take them away. In most cases, the public believes very strongly that antibiotics are a right for animals, and animal welfare will usually trump other things. What they do require of us is to use them judiciously and sustainably.”
