Day 113 - 03 Apr 95 - Page 31
1 animals are -- drugs are used as surrogates for good
2 keeping. They are used as substitutes when one ought to
3 clear up the problems without using drugs in this way.
4 That is bad practice.
5
6 I mentioned to you, say, dairy cows in cubicles, kept
7 inside at the present time, with the susceptibility to
8 mastitis. That has to be treated with antibacterial,
9 things like penicillin, tetracyclines, streptomycin.
10 Similarly, lameness is very often treated in that way.
11 Animals get infected with worms. Many of them, I should
12 say -- there are many vaccines also that have to be used,
13 some of them for parasitic infections.
14
15 There are diseases like brucellosis and tuberculosis, for
16 instance, for which there are vaccinations. But, generally
17 speaking, I am coming on to problems on the skin. Warbles
18 is one possible one which is causing some concern at the
19 moment because it is rampant on the Continent, I believe.
20 Those sorts of diseases are treated -----
21
22 Q. Sorry, this is warble fly?
23 A. Warble fly.
24
25 Q. Are they the standard treatment for cattle?
26 A. Yes, for that sort of problem one resorts to things
27 like organophosphorus compounds -- one can use other things
28 which cost more -- or one can, one also has the problem
29 with worms of one sort or another. Helminth is a
30 scientific word, that is, H-E-L-M-I-N-T-H.
31
32 Q. You say for the treatment of warble fly -- sorry.
33
34 MR. JUSTICE BELL: How are these administered?
35 A. Some are administered as pour-ons, some are
36 administered by mouth and some are administered by
37 injection. If could I just answer that, the trouble with
38 injection, quite often, is that farmers do not use clean
39 needles, and so one gets an abscess with the injection, and
40 then one has to use an antibiotic because the animal is
41 infected. So, that is a problem.
42
43 Q. Are antibiotics routinely used as a way of dealing with
44 infections, is that a standard response?
45 A. Well, there are two sorts of antibiotics. I am now
46 using the terminology of the Swan Committee. There are
47 antibiotics that are non-therapeutic and there are those
48 that are used purely as growth promoters. The ones that
49 are used primarily as growth promoters are virginiamycin,
50 bacitracin, avoparcin, flavomycin. There may be others but
51 those, essentially, are growth promoters that are not much
52 used in medicine, and there is not much danger the Swan
53 Committee thought of multiresistance building up. So,
54 those are used just as growth promoters, production
55 boosters.
56
57 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Just pause a moment. You said that there
58 were two sorts of antibiotics; there were the
59 non-therapeutic and those used purely as growth promoters.
60 I am not sure that what is what you meant to say but that
