The
extensive use of drugs on British farms could pose a serious threat
to public health through a build up of salmonella infection, according
to a TV programme this week.
This and other findings linked to the alleged
"indiscriminate" use of drugs in livestock farming were
powerfully spelled out in a BBC documentary - a programme shrouded
in controversy even before its transmission.
The fist in BBC-2's new series "Brass Tacks,"
it set out to investigate the connections between a rapid build
up over the last few years of salmonella virus in meat and the use
of certain antibiotics.
Viewers were told that it was the balancing out
of big profits for farmers on the one side and financial ruin on
the other that pressurised the industry into using drugs on the
present scale.
Said an environmental health officer: "I
fully believe that intensive animal husbandry is one of the prime
reasons for an increase in salmonella infection in food animals
and, therefore, an increase in salmonella infection in human beings."
He added that last year there were 11,000 notified
cases of food poisoning in the UK, 55-60 per cent of which were
due to salmonella virus.
"KNIFE EDGE"
The programmed described
farmers of intensive units as "living on a knife edge."
It said that the livestock drug industry was worth £100 million
per year, one fifth of which was made up of antibiotics, but the
greatest problem now faced |
was
the resistance by many viruses to combatant drugs and the development
of new "super-germs."
In recent years there had been a serious build
up of multi-resistant salmonellae. Those bacteria were now escaping
and reappearing in human food. Meath that looked perfectly all right
to the butcher and mouth watering to the consumer could contain
resistant organisms that only the scientists could be expected to
detect, said the programme producers.
An example of ineffective treatment and its consequences
was demonstrated by a look back to 1977 when a batch of calves on
a Leicestershire farm were treated for a salmonella virus with chloramphenicol.
The drug had no effect - neither did sulphonamide, tetracyclin or
streptomycin - all drugs that should have proved satisfactory.
The outcome of the infection was that this resistant
strain of the virus was found to be the most common found in bovines
by the end of 1077 and was expected to be the most common diagnosed
in humans by the end of this year.
TESTS
The programme expressed
the fear that this resistance could be transferred to typhoid virus
and so making an outbreak in humans untreatable.
"Viewers were told that all new drugs are
tested by the Veterinary Products Committee, but that after nine
years in existence there were still 3,000 individual veterinary
products awaiting testing.
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