The Canadian livestock sector has rejected demands from opposition MPs that they voluntarily stop giving antibiotics to healthy animals.
Industry representatives told the House of Commons health committee last week that antibiotic use on healthy animals is prudent disease-prevention.
The committee meeting was sparked in part by a CBC Marketplace program about antibiotic resistant bacteria in supermarket chicken that the program linked to on-farm antibiotic use.
Opposition MPs on the committee said critics of antibiotic use on farms have presented a believable indictment against the practice.
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“Are you prepared to voluntarily, because you don’t have the law at this point, stop using the antibiotics, at least on healthy chickens and other healthy animals?” asked Liberal health critic Ujjal Dosanjh.
The answer was no.
“Chicken Farmers of Canada believes the judicious use is the way to go,” replied CFC executive director Mike Dungate.
Dr. Reynold Bergen, science director for the Beef Cattle Research Council, told MPs cattle producers “use antimicrobial products very strategically.”
Opposition MPs said those terms are too vague to give comfort.
New Democrat health critic Megan Leslie said it is unbelievable that antibiotics are given to healthy animals. In many cases they are over-the- counter products that do not require a prescription and are not monitored other than through farmer self-reporting, she added.
“If you use a very low level all the time, it would be like feeding your children antibiotics with their breakfast cereal every morning to make sure they don’t get disease later on,” veterinarian Gail Hansen from Pew Charitable Trusts in the United States told MPs.
Rick Smith, executive director of Environmental Defence, raised the ante by insisting that overuse of antibiotics in livestock threatens to create resistant bacteria that will return Canada to the 1950s before widespread use of antibiotics became a key tool to fight killer infections.
“Does the unnecessary use of antibiotics on a healthy animal like a chicken trump the necessary use of antibiotics for a sick child?” he asked.
While opposition MPs sympathized with the critics, Conservative MPs bristled and industry representatives said those questions did not properly frame the issue.
Dungate, the focus of most of the questions, said the antibiotics that are mainly used on farms are not the type used on humans.
As well, if farmers waited until birds were sick, the antibiotics used would be more powerful and more dangerous because they are similar to drugs given to humans.
He also took aim at Marketplace.
“(It) was designed by its nature to be sensationalistic,” he said. “In doing so, it painted an inaccurate and incomplete picture of the Canadian chicken industry, production and antibiotic use and resistance.”
He said some of the TV program’s tests of chicken products found bacteria resistant to antibiotics that are not used in the chicken industry.
However, Dr. John Prescott of the Ontario Veterinary College told MPs the problem could be fixed if the government went back to a 2002 Health Canada report.
It recommended that animal antibiotics be available only with a prescription, getting rid of own use and better policing of imports.
The current system of divided jurisdictions between Health Canada, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Public Health Agency of Canada means no one oversees the entire file, said Prescott.
