The World Health Organisation (WHO) has admonished farmers and others engaged in livestock production to desist from giving healthy animals antibiotics in an attempt to quicken their growth.
The world body handed down this warning in a set of new guidelines for curbing human resistance to antibiotics and similar medicines.
Revealing the updated guidelines, Director-General of The World Health Organisation, Tedros Ghebreyesus, emphasized that administering antibiotics to healthy animals could lead to over-medication and further raise an already existent threat of antibiotic resistance, which has gotten to a stage where some types of bacteria remain untreatable with the use of medicines.
He stressed that treatment with antibiotics should only feature when animals get sick, or in the event of an infection among a herd, flock or shoal.
“A lack of effective antibiotics is as serious a security threat as a sudden and deadly disease outbreak,’’ he said.
According to the Chief Food Safety Expert of WHO, Kazuaki Miyagishima, the volume of antibiotics used for animals is on the rise worldwide due to a growing demand for food often produced through intensive animal husbandry.
The Geneva-based UN health agency observed that in some countries, 80 per cent of all used antibiotics end up as growth-enhancement medication in animal husbandry. It therefore advised farmers to administer less of such medicines and prevent animal diseases through improvement in hygiene and use of vaccinations.
On a broader scale, some countries have since taken countermeasures in the issue with the European Union banning the use of antibiotics for growth promotion in 2006.
Research findings indicate that such restrictions on antibiotic use in food-producing animals have recorded a marked reduction in resistant bacteria in these animals by up to 39 per cent.
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