Farming pharmaceuticals

The use of drugs in farm animals is strictly controlled to prevent the appearance of drug residues in foods for human consumption. Quite rightly, that does not eliminate the use of drugs for animal welfare purposes, and perhaps as an additional growth promoter.

Those who watched the BBC programme Countryfile yesterday evening (25 September 2011) will have seen a farmer injecting a lame animal with ‘an antibiotic’. While the animal should not be permitted to suffer I would question the use of antibiotics in this way, at last without professional veterinary supervision.

That concern extends to the farming formulary, the range of drugs available to farmers without veterinary supervision. With antibiotics in particular, indiscriminate use is almost guaranteed to result in an increase in the rate of antibiotic resistance among bacterial pathogens and lessen the effectiveness  of those drugs, whether for veterinary of human use.

Other concerns include the excretion of all those perhaps uncontrolled drugs to land that perhaps contribute to far greater contamination of water supplies that do drugs for human use. And what about the syringe and needle used for drug administration. Those drugs, the containers in which they are packaged, and the syringe and needle waste associated with its administration are all clinical wastes of veterinary origin that must be disposed with care and control. Who collects clinical waste from veterinary surgeries and farms? The former seem to produce far less waste that their activity might suggest, and collections directly from farms are almost unknown. That suggests these wastes are mismanaged, with a clear need for timely regulatory guidance and control.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006t0bv

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