The use on UK pig farms of a class of antibiotics - said to be “critically important” for human health by the World Health Organisation - has more than doubled, according to industry data obtained by the Guardian.

While the use of antibiotics by pig farmers has generally decreased in recent years, falling by 62 per cent since 2015, industry data obtained by the Guardian, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and Vet Record, has revealed that a specific class of drugs is being used more than ever prompting fresh concerns about drug-resistant bacteria.

A review of data from 2015 to 2019 shows that the use of aminoglycosides, which includes gentamicin, an antibiotic used to treat meningitis and infections of the blood and abdomen in humans, is being given to pigs increasingly in what experts believe is a response to an upcoming ban on the use of zinc oxide as a treatment for scour (diarrhoea).

While the UK follows the European Medicines Agency’s classifications for veterinary antibiotics, which lists aminoglycosides as lower priority antibiotics, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has deemed them to be “critically important” to human health. In pigs, aminoglycosides are used to treat scour and other illnesses, but according to the EMA their use in human and veterinary medicine is linked to the “increased prevalence of resistance”, such as with drug-resistant E. coli, salmonella and variants of MRSA found in farmed animals.

The data was obtained from the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) following a freedom of information request. Industry experts speaking to the Guardian said that the spike in the use of aminoglycosides was probably due to the phasing out of higher priority antibiotics including colistin, and a UK and EU-wide ban on the use of zinc oxide, also used to treat scour.

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Awareness of the role animal agriculture plays in the forming of new strains of drug-resistant microbes was growing prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Yet drug-resistant bacteria could pose an even greater threat, rendering many of our most important antibiotics useless.

“There needs to be much stronger international agreement, and discipline following those agreements, that we will dramatically reduce the use of antibiotics in animals – especially those that are critical for human health,” said Jim O’Neill, chair of the government’s superbug review.

As discussed in our video Coronavirus is just the start. Something far worse is coming., 700,000 people around the world die from antibiotic-resistant diseases every year, a figure that is predicted to grow to a staggering 10 million per year by 2050 if our current use of antibiotics continues unchecked. We already have resistant strains of tuberculosis responsible for 200,000 deaths per year, but also resistant forms of urinary tract infections and STDs including a super-resistant strain of gonorrhoea that is almost untreatable.

Should the increasing use of aminoglycosides in farms lead to the emergence of strains of bacterial meningitis resistant to gentamicin, the threat to public health cannot be understated. Bacterial meningitis is rarer than the viral form but more serious, killing one in 20 people in the UK infected with the disease.

Farming is driving the increased use of antibiotics, and the more they are used unnecessarily, the greater the chances of the emergence of novel strains of resistant bacteria. On pig farms, the separation of very young piglets from their mothers is a “stressful practice associated with large increases in antibiotic use,” said Cóilín Nunan, scientific adviser at campaign group Alliance to Save our Antibiotics.

Poor animal husbandry and intensive farming conditions are all contributors to the use of antibiotics on pig farms, all of which are prevalent on UK pig farms as our recent investigation into Willerby Wold Piggeries has shown, plus other exposes from Animal Equality and Viva in just the last two months.

Andrew Gough is Media and Investigations Manager for Surge.

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