Blame for bacterial antibiotic resistance has been levelled at the intensive livestock industry worldwide.
The Public Health Agency of Canada is starting an on-farm component to its three-year-old antibiotic resistance surveillance program that may help shed some light on the issue.
Resistant bacteria can double the treatment costs and limit the drugs that are effective in treating human or livestock illnesses. To what effect agricultural use of antimicrobials are responsible for developing superbugs may be found during a study by the agency.
Its Canadian Integrated Program for the Antimicrobial Resistance Surveillance, or CIPARS, already samples chicken, pork and beef at abattoirs in Quebec and Ontario and retail food outlets in those provinces as well as Saskatchewan. It is now beginning to work with veterinarians and hog farmers across the country.
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The researchers will use veterinarians to collect samples from 89 hog farms, looking for bacteria such as E. coli, campylobacter, salmonella and enterococcus.
Sheryl Gow of the agency told vets attending a conference in Saskatoon last month that on-farm monitoring and data gathering is difficult.
“Stores and abattoirs were much easier. Farms are a different matter. But we are working it out,” she said.
The United States and Canada have set up similar monitoring systems, while Denmark has its own system, with a focus on swine data collection.
Gow said veterinarians and producers should be interested in participating in the project.
“We need to consider that this will aid the industry and help to avoid problems down the road that could result from a lack of information.”
She said the data would help to show that veterinarians and producers are using antimicrobial drugs in a judicious manner.
“Trade benefits from surveillance systems, especially if all of your trading competitors are doing it. It can be market preservation,” she said.
This month the agency begins enrolling veterinary clinics in the program. This fall, those clinics will enrol the voluntary sentinel farms and in 2006, begin the first full year of on-farm surveillance.
The herds will be from farms that market more than 2,000 hogs per year and will be geographically representative of the national swine population: 10 in each of Saskatchewan and Alberta, 21 in Manitoba, 24 in each of Ontario and Quebec.
Sampling will take place three times a year with producers filling out a questionnaire each time. Test origins will remain confidential and the agency will not know which came from where. To aid in producer and veterinarian participation, payments will be made for each sampling day.
Producers must be members of the Canadian Pork Council’s Canadian Quality Assurance program to participate.
Plans to include feedlots and poultry farms are in the works, said Gow.
