Lucies Organic Store - UK

Organic Farms

Key Recommendations - Bans and Restrictions:

Avilamycin - the growth promoting antibiotic should be banned straight away, all existing stocks should be destroyed and farmers compensated accordingly.

An EU exemption should be sought for a limited period of time - up to one year, to allow the growth promoting antibiotic zinc bacitracin to begin being added to the food rations of boiler chickens, in order to facilitate an immediate ban on avilamycin. However zinc bacitracin should not be re-licensed as a therapeutic antibiotic, because of its potential use in hospitals to fight superbugs.

Only in extreme cases in individual animals of all species should fluroquinolone antibiotics be permitted, they are currently used in mass medication and this should no longer be allowed. However their use in poultry production should effectively cease, and all vets that use fluroquinolones in extreme cases should state their reasons for doing so in the farm medicines book.

Enteric infections should no longer be treated with fluroquinolones and 3rd generation cephalosporins in any farm animals. This is to prevent any further development of resistant food poisoning strains.

There should be reforms made in EU agricultural policy to encourage livestock production methods with minimum dependency on antibiotics.

Help should be given to aid these livestock producers reduce their dependency on antibiotics, practical and technical help so they can change their production methods with ease.

Enteric salmonella in all farm animals should become a notifiable disease, and rather than treatment with antibiotics, a slaughter policy should be introduced for S. typhimurium DT104.

There is stronger evidence to support the ban on antibiotics in farm animals than that for hormone use. Britain should therefore push for the introduction of an immediate unilateral ban on any livestock products produced with drugs banned in the EU.

The advertisement for any veterinary medicines should become illegal, except in the veterinary press.

Key Recommendations - The Veterinary Profession

Veterinary prescribing practice should be independently scrutinised to help rebuild confidence in the practice and to identify problem practitioners and farms. All antibiotic use in farms should be monitored by one single agency. Inspectors should give annual visits to farms and reports should be made from the inspection, which should then be analysed by trained staff. Any irregularities that are significant should be considered by independent vetting committees. Free advisory visits for farmers that consistently over-use antibiotics should be given to help implement recommendations. Vets that prescribe poorly should be re-trained and vets that prescribe excessively should be prosecuted.

Veterinary surgeons should have the right to despence with veterinary medication as well as prescribe it, but should no longer check farm records of these.

Vets and other specialists should run schools of Preventative Veterinary Medicine, they should be helped to establish these schools by the Government. The schools should research, collate and disseminate reliable information to farmers, vets and others.

Some of the text above is from an article on the Soil Associations website - Click Here to go to the Soil Associatios website

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