Farmers warned over antibiotic resistance

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The World Health Organisation says farmers and the food industry should stop using antibiotics routinely.

The WHO says its new recommendations aim to help preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics that are important for human medicine by reducing their unnecessary use in animals. In some countries, approximately 80 per cent of total consumption of medically important antibiotics is in the animal sector, largely for growth promotion in healthy animals, it says.

The WHO said in a statement over-use and misuse of antibiotics in animals and humans was contributing to the rising threat of antibiotic resistance. It said some types of bacteria that cause serious infections in humans had already developed resistance to most or all of the available treatments, and there were very few promising options in the research pipeline.

"A lack of effective antibiotics is as serious a security threat as a sudden and deadly disease outbreak," said WHO Director General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

A systematic review published this week in The Lancet Planetary Health found that interventions that restrict antibiotic use in food-producing animals reduced antibiotic-resistant bacteria in these animals by up to 39 per cent.

The WHO said healthy animals should only receive antibiotics to prevent disease if it had been diagnosed in other animals in the same flock, herd, or fish population.

Antibiotics used in animals should be selected from those WHO had listed as being "least important" to human health, and not from those classified as "highest priority critically important". These antibiotics were often the last line, or one of limited treatments, available to treat serious bacterial infections in humans.

The New Zealand Veterinary Association was this week reported as saying antibiotic resistance was an enormous issue. It has a goal for New Zealand agriculture to be antibiotic free by 2030.

In an earlier statement on its website the NZVA quoted a 2015 PwC report that found that as one of the three lowest users of antibiotics to treat animals in the OECD, New Zealand could increase the value of its exports with reduced-antibiotic livestock systems and scientific innovations.