UK not doing enough to curb antibiotic use on farms, say campaigners

Loopholes in proposed post-Brexit laws could allow preventive use to continue, raising risk of resistance, says coalition of groups

Proposed laws to curb antibiotic use on UK farms contain loopholes that could undermine the fight against deadly drug-resistant bacteria, campaigners say, adding that they were drafted after closed-door meetings with industry.

The government published the draft legislation, designed to replace EU rules post-Brexit, after consultations with pharmaceutical, veterinary medicine and farming lobby groups, according to freedom of information requests filed by the investigative journalism site DeSmog.

Health and animal welfare groups have broadly welcomed measures in the draft legislation to stop farmers routinely giving animals antibiotics as a preventive measure – which the World Health Organization (WHO) sees as a risk factor for antimicrobial resistance.

However, campaigners say that clauses allowing the preventive use of antibiotics for whole groups of animals in “exceptional circumstances” represent a loophole that could allow the practice to continue.

Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics, a coalition of health, sustainable farming and civil society organisations, said it had written repeatedly to the government to request meetings on the legislation, but had not received a response.

“It’s clear the consultation was biased in favour of certain industry interests that have quite consistently opposed stronger regulations on antibiotic use,” said Cóilín Nunan, a scientific adviser to the coalition.

Excessive use of farm antibiotics is a major driver of antibiotic resistance worldwide, according to the WHO. Without stronger policies to counter the emergence of new superbugs, the 700,000 annual deaths caused by antimicrobial resistance could reach 10 million by 2050 – more than currently die from cancer, according to a 2016 report.

The UK’s Veterinary Medicines Directorate held a series of workshops with representatives of the pharmaceutical, veterinary medicine industries, and other “regulatory partners” to discuss the proposed legislation from December 2021 to July 2022, according to the FoI responses. Civil society groups were not invited.

A directorate spokesperson said the organisation and legislators “were and remain open to dialogue with all interested parties”.

“The purpose of these meetings was to discuss technical aspects and to inform our assessment of likely impacts of potential proposals for changes to the legislation,” the spokesperson said.

Further consultation sessions open to all stakeholders were held during a subsequent public consultation that ran from February to March this year, the spokesperson added.

Antibiotics have been integral to a boom in global meat production, which grew by 45% between 2000 and 2020, contributing to agriculture’s ballooning greenhouse gas emissions. The drugs have allowed intensive farms to rear large numbers of animals indoors while avoiding disease outbreaks that would otherwise occur in crowded conditions, and industry associations worldwide have been wary of mandatory restrictions on their use.

UK farmers have cut antibiotic use by an estimated 55% since 2014, mostly due to voluntary measures, and the agricultural sector uses fewer antibiotics than in most countries, including in the EU. Nevertheless, UK farmers use significantly more than some Nordic peers. Rates of antibiotic use are 2.5 times higher than in Sweden, almost eight times higher than in Iceland, and more than 10 times higher than in Norway per kilo of animal farmed, according to EU data.

Nunan said: “The proposed new laws contain significant and welcome improvements on the current rules. However, without further changes, the way the law has been written leaves open the possibility that the preventive use of antibiotics will continue routinely on some farms.”

In contrast to the UK, the EU has banned the preventive use of antibiotics, except to treat individual animals in exceptional cases.

Campaigners had hoped the UK would follow suit after the government said in 2019 that it would “implement the provisions” of the EU regulations, which were agreed before the UK left the bloc in January 2020, and came into effect last year.

However, the UK government has since weakened that commitment, saying only that it would implement “similar provisions”. In March, the government confirmed it would not introduce a “full, blanket ban” on the practice of routinely giving antibiotics to healthy groups of animals.

The Responsible Use of Medicines in Agriculture Alliance (Ruma), a coalition of veterinary medicine, pharmaceutical and farming groups, which took part in the consultations, has argued against imposing blanket bans on the preventive use of antibiotics for groups of animals in the UK.

“Compulsory controls are a blunt tool which wouldn’t take into account the complexities across each of the sectors,” said Chris Lloyd, Ruma’s general secretary. “There is also a real danger that blanket bans would be to the detriment of animal health and welfare.”

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Mark Spencer, the food minister, told a parliamentary debate in January that while the government’s proposal “bears similarities” to EU laws, they factored in that the UK already used lower levels of antibiotics than many countries.

Advocates of tougher regulations are also concerned that the proposed UK laws are silent on how far farmers should be allowed to administer antibiotics to large groups of animals if one falls ill. EU rules impose limits on this practice so it cannot be used as a pretext for excessive preventive use.

“If you have a chicken shed with 30,000 chickens, you’ll always find one that is ill,” Nunan said.

The Veterinary Medicines Directorate said the proposed legislation constituted “a significant increase in restriction and scrutiny” of group preventive use of antibiotics, and that additional guidance on interpretation would be provided once the laws were finalised.

Most animal farming sectors in the UK voluntarily provide some data on their use of antibiotics to the government, but campaigners want the new legislation to require mandatory reporting, including specific data on the extent of preventive use. The National Farmers’ Union (NFU) and Ruma deny that antibiotics are routinely used preventively on UK farms.

Campaigners dispute this, however, pointing to official data showing that 75% of farm antibiotics sold in the UK are used in feed or water. Less than a quarter of drugs are sold in the form of injections, which are used to treat individual animals.

Countries with the lowest antibiotic use overall administer far lower proportions of antibiotics via food and water than in the UK. For example, in Sweden, which uses less than half the farm antibiotics administered in the UK, the proportion of antibiotics given via feed or drinking troughs is less than 10%, while 75% are given by injection.

The new EU regulations require member states to collect information about actual on-farm use of antibiotics.

The UK’s draft law says antibiotics cannot be used “to compensate for poor hygiene, inadequate animal husbandry, or poor farm management practices”. But the legislation does not define any of these terms – an omission campaigners say leaves significant room for interpretation.

For example, piglets taken from their mothers early in order to reimpregnate the sow are often given antibiotics to prevent illness or diarrhoea. The NFU says the industry is working to develop non-antibiotic methods to combat piglet illness due to early weaning, such as faecal implants, but scientists say antibiotic use could be cut simply by increasing the weaning age.

“It’s clear that antibiotics are routinely being used [preventively] on UK farms,” says Lindsay Duncan, of World Animal Protection. “This is never acceptable. We’re losing some of our last-resort, lifeline medications.

“We’re going to see a stagnation in the amount of antibiotic use that can be voluntarily reduced. The farming system can’t change overnight. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be bringing in legislation that aspires to this kind of change.”