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Tyson is forming working groups with independent farmers, company suppliers, veterinarians and others with the objective of talking about how antibiotics are used on the farm and to develop new ideas to cut the use of drugs vital to fighting human infections in its US beef, pork and turkey supply chains. The working groups will begin meeting this summer. Company officials said that Tyson has not set a time frame or specific goals for decreasing human antibiotic use in its other protein businesses. ‘It’s the same challenge that McDonald’s faced with its chicken


business,’ said Steven Roach, senior analyst at consumer group ‘Keep Antibiotics Working’. He added that, while Tyson may not control that supply chain right now, they could, like McDonald’s, ‘make demands on their suppliers to do things differently.’ While veterinary use of antibiotics is legal, controversy has grown


over the routine feeding of antibiotics that are important to humans to otherwise healthy chicken, cattle and pigs in a bid to stave off disease and help the animals grow more quickly. Tyson says it has already stopped using all antibiotics in its thirty-five hatcheries and has cut human antibiotics used to treat its broiler chickens by more than eighty per cent since 2011. The company said it always requires a veterinary prescription when antibiotics are used on its broiler farms. There has been a substantial move in the US towards phasing out routine antibiotic usage from poultry production. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Pilgrim’s Pride Corp, the nation’s second- largest poultry processor, would cut all antibiotics from a quarter of its chicken production by 2019. Rival poultry processor, Perdue Farms Inc, told Reuters more than 95 per cent of the chickens it produces are raised without antibiotics approved for human use and more than half of its chickens are raised with no antibiotics of any kind. This appears, at least in part, to reflect customer pressure; one leading user of chicken gave its suppliers five years to meet its commitment to go antibiotic-free for chicken production. Perdue Farms is a major supplier to the producer in question. Tyson has reported that the company been working with livestock


drug companies and others to test a variety of alternatives to antibiotics to protect birds, ranging from probiotics to essential oils derived from plant extracts. However, a recent announcement has emphasised the need, if


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such emphasis were needed, to do everything possible to diminish the growing threat of antimicrobial resistance as a result of antibiotic overuse.


Doctors are warning that the rise of an almost untreatable


‘superbug’, immune to some of the last-line antibiotics available to hospitals, poses a serious threat to patients. The number of laboratory-confirmed cases of the bug, called carbapenemase- producing Enterobacteriaceae (CPE), rose from three to nearly 2,000 in the twelve years to 2015, according to Public Health England (PHE). But that may be far short of the real number because hospitals are not bound to report suspected cases. PHE admits it does not know where the infections are coming from or how many people are dying. Freedom of information requests made by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reveal that at least 81 people infected with CPE have died since 2009 at 66 NHSTrusts in England, although in some cases, the bug may have been a complicating factor rather than the main cause of death. But the real figure seems almost certain to be much higher. Many


NHS trusts did not respond to the requests or were unable to supply complete data. Out of 136 NHS hospital trusts that were asked for the numbers of infections and deaths between 2009 and 2016, 97 responded but nearly half did not have data on CPE or could not extract the details. In Manchester and London, dealing with CPE has, according to usually reliable reports, cost NHS trusts almost £10 million. There have also been confirmed outbreaks in Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Nottingham, Colchester, Edinburgh, Belfast, Dublin and Limerick, among others. It is good to see that producers of chickens as well as other


livestock in the US are waking up to the dangers of irresponsible use of antibiotics in livestock production. The emergence of a new superbug only serves to emphasise the importance of indiscriminate use of antibiotics; hoping that the problem will just go away could rebound upon us in spades.


TREASURY THREATENS CASH? In all the debate about the future of agriculture in the UK post-Brexit, one issue has stood out: the amount of money that UK farmers may or may not receive in place of today’s Basic Payment, which replaced


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