Non-EU countries face new antibiotic rules on meat imports

20 Jul 2018 --- Countries wanting to import meat into Europe will now have to abide by EU laws on antibiotics as part of a new regulation on veterinary medicine. European Parliament has decided that products of animal origin imported by third countries will now have to meet the EU’s requirements of antibiotics use.

A vital part of the new rules – which are to be laid out in full in the EU’s tertiary legislation – is the ongoing fight against antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and how the new rules impose measures to help limit the use of antibiotics in the animal sector.

However, there are concerns for several non-EU countries that these new measures could have an adverse impact by disrupting global trade, according to reports.

According to the alliance for better food and farming Sustain, the overuse of antibiotics in animals is contributing to the danger of antibiotic resistance in humans. The Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics was co-founded by Sustain and campaigns to stop the overuse of antibiotics in animal farming.

Alison Craig, from the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics, says that we could be entering a “post-antibiotic age” where in the future people could get a common infection and die from it in a hospital because the antibiotics will not work anymore. 

“Intensive livestock production is dependent on the routine preventative use of antibiotics and it couldn’t operate without that,” she says.

“Because animals or birds are being kept in very high numbers it confined areas on their own feces, infection is inevitable, that’s why they use antibiotics on a routine preventative basis.”

“A pig, for example in the UK, in typically on antibiotics is on antibiotics for 20 percent of its life, if it wasn’t then it wouldn’t survive and the poultry being produced in these big broiler sheds are the same. They are dependent on the routine preventative use of antibiotics which then leads to a buildup of antimicrobial resistance in these animals which passes to us through the food chain.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned that farmers must stop using powerful antibiotics on animals because of the serious risk to human health. Historically antibiotics have been routinely fed to farmed animals as a preventative measure to stop them catching diseases. 

However, with the rise of antibiotic resistance and the lack of new antibiotics being discovered there is pressure on the farming industry to stop this practice.