NEWS: Mass use of preventative antibiotics on farms could lead to a pandemic far worse than Covid-19, campaigners from the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics coalition have warned this week.

Health experts and animal justice campaigners have long warned that the widespread use of antibiotics to prevent rather than treat infections among farm animals has created the perfect conditions for the emergence of untreatable “superbugs” with the potential to spread to humans.

While the use of antibiotics on farmed animals has seen a 52 per cent reduction since 2014, a 2020 study published in the journal Antibiotics estimated that 66 per cent of all antibiotics used worldwide are used on livestock.

According to the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics (ASOA) - founded in 2009 by Compassion in World Farming, the Soil Association and Sustain - intensively farmed animals are particularly prone to infections.

“If you imagine a big herd of pigs or chickens that are stressed and overcrowded, the immune suppression they get from this environment is really asking for disease and illness to spread. Instead of making changes to these conditions, it has been for decades cheaper and easier to give them all low levels of antibiotics in their feed and water,” Suzi Shingler, campaign manager for the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics, told the Independent.

“Mass dosing creates the perfect breeding ground for the strongest type of bacteria to survive,” she added. “The worst elements will survive the long-term low dosing of antibiotics and it’s like supercharging the normal natural selection process of superbugs.”

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As discussed in a Surge video last year - Coronavirus is just the start. Something far worse is coming. - by 2050, drug-resistant diseases could kill 10 million people every year according to World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates. In 2016, MRSA was found in British pork sold at Asda and Sainsbury’s, and in 2018 a study published in Frontiers in Microbiology discussed the discovery of the mcr-1 gene in samples of E.Coli found in pigs making the bacteria resistant to colistin, a “last line of defence” when fighting multi-drug resistant infections.

“Other forms of mass medication, such as coccidiostats in poultry feed and zinc oxide in piglet feed, are used routinely in an attempt to control diseases considered nearly unavoidable in highly concentrated indoor systems, demonstrating that disease remains a major problem in such systems, despite biosecurity,” the Alliance said in a statement last year.

“Keeping very large numbers of genetically similar animals in close confinement allows viruses to keep on circulating, increasing the number of variants until eventually one emerges that is able to jump species. The misuse of antibiotics in livestock can, therefore, be seen as not just contributing to antibiotic resistance but, by enabling us to keep large numbers of animals in these conditions, to the possible emergence of new viral pathogens too.”

New EU legislation will ban the routine use of antibiotics in animal agriculture from January 28, thereby prohibiting preventative low dose treatments. The UK is yet to follow suit, but the government’s Veterinary Medicines Directorate has started a consultation on the matter.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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