Health Committee on March 8th, 2011

[Mike Dungate]

The antibiotics we are using--especially the preventative ones--are for the most part class IV ionophores that have little or no human health relationship. So do we want to just reduce the amount of the ones that don't have a human connection, or are we more interested in finding out what the real issues are in terms of it, and taking a smart approach to making sure we reduce them?

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

The question I have is why are we using antibiotics on healthy animals, sir? Can you answer that question?

[Mike Dungate]

This is preventative medicine. That is the point, and this is what we found in Europe. I'll ask Dr. Rosengren to talk about the European experience and what the real impact there is. As you move away from preventative antibiotics, if you have to treat a sick bird you're going to use the antibiotics that are more important, and you're going to use more. That is the experience they've had in Europe.

Let me ask Dr. Rosengren to explain the result of that experiment in Denmark. We don't necessarily need to follow that lead; we need to follow a smart lead that we're doing in Canada right now with the government.

[Dr. Leigh Rosengren, Representative, Rosengren Epidemiology Consulting, Chicken Farmers of Canada]

Thank you.

I'll attempt to address your questions as best as possible.

It's not a simple question to stop using antibiotics inappropriately, because it's a very grey and complex area.

Dr. Hansen raised two key issues. One was the use of ceftiofur, and the second was the use of growth-promoting drugs. Those are two opposite spectrum issues. One is the use of a class I drug that's classified as critically important for human medicine. It is used in the chicken industry strategically for one particular issue, which is omphalophlebitis in young day-old chicks. The other is an issue of using drugs that are unimportant to human medicine, or class IV drugs, to prevent subclinical disease from becoming clinical.

So your question is very complex, because it deals with a myriad of issues to stop using antimicrobials in these instances.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

Do you have a practice in your industry to use prescribed antibiotics? Yes or no.

[Mike Dungate]

Yes, absolutely we do.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

Do you use unprescribed antibiotics?

[Mike Dungate]

Everything, every--

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

I mean antibiotics not prescribed by a veterinarian--not approved by Health Canada, but not prescribed by a veterinarian.

[Dr. Leigh Rosengren]

Yes, Health Canada has many, many drugs available in the veterinarian pharmaceutical industry that are considered over-the-counter. Hence they are available without prescription as antibiotics. That goes back to the comment Dr. Prescott made about the report recommendations to Health Canada. That is an issue in Canada.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

Are you currently using antibiotics, as is alleged by both CBC and the two colleagues of yours who are mentioned, as growth promoters in the industry?

[Dr. Leigh Rosengren]

Today in the industry there are certainly drugs licensed for use as growth promoters. In theory, yes, producers are using those drugs according to the label put on by the VDD. In general, our experience from the EU situation has been that although it is termed “growth promotion”, in general what the drug use is doing is suppressing subclinical disease that without that antimicrobial exposure would lead to explosive clinical outbreaks that not always, but often, would require further antimicrobial therapy.

So yes, there are drugs licensed for that in Canada as we speak.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

By drugs licensed, you mean that the drugs are approved for use, but you don't have to use them unless your chickens are sick. You use them to prevent them from getting sick, and they grow faster, and they're unhealthy. Am I right or wrong?

[Mike Dungate]

We make sure that we have healthy birds. We have an on-farm food safety program that makes sure that we stop the introduction of bacteria. We try to reduce the load there. We have a different production system from what they have in the U.S. In our system, you clean out those barns after every single flock. They're primarily cement floors, not dirt floors, which goes on in the U.S., so there is not a bacteria load that goes from flock to flock. We thereby reduce the amount we need to use in this country.

We try to reduce the use any way we can, and good management practices are a key to that. We have 97% of our farmers on that program. We're working to make sure that we have to use only as much as we need to keep a healthy flock and to make sure there is safe chicken going into the marketplace.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

I guess that's what you define as judicious use.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Tim Uppal]

Thank you.

We'll go to Monsieur Malo.

[Luc Malo, Bloc, Verchères—Les Patriotes, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Ms. Rosengren and Ms. Hansen, you seem to have different opinions of the current situation.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Tim Uppal]

Has everybody had an opportunity to get your earpieces in?

[Luc Malo, Bloc, Verchères—Les Patriotes, QC]

Is everything alright, Ms. Hansen?

Ms. Hansen and Ms. Rosengren, you seem to have different views of Europe's experience with banning the use of antibiotics on healthy animals. Could you explain to me why that is?

You seem to be saying that banning the use of antibiotics on healthy animals had had a direct impact on human health. However, Ms. Rosengren seems to disagree with that statement. I would simply like you to clarify the matter for me.

[Dr. Gail Hansen]

Okay, I'll give it a go first.

I've actually been to Denmark and have talked to the Danes and have seen how they raise both their pigs and their chickens. They will tell you themselves that while they're certainly willing to look at any new data, they don't want to have somebody else interpreting their data. The Danes themselves and the EU have said that when they took away antibiotics for non-therapeutic use--which means giving them to healthy animals--they saw a decrease in antibiotic resistance in the animals. They're still looking at it in people. It doesn't happen automatically. Sometimes it doesn't happen. That's the problem. If you get resistance to an antibiotic, sometimes that antibiotic resistance doesn't go away, and then we've lost that antibiotic forever.

[Dr. Leigh Rosengren]

I apologize if I appeared to disagree with Dr. Hansen.

The EU model has been successful for the countries in the European Union, but we have had very different legislation on veterinary antimicrobials in our country, in North America, dating way back to the 1970s. It's not as if you can cut and paste the legislation that they have. We have a completely different system.

The reason we appear to disagree is that antimicrobial resistance is an extremely complex issue. We're talking about multiple commodities; and within each commodity, multiple bacteria species; and within each of those bacteria species, multiple resistance concerns driven by multiple drugs. It's easy to get lost in the details and draw on something that's a success, or dismiss something else as a failure.

Overall, it's a flawed experiment because there's no control to the situation. We don't know where the situation would have been without the withdrawal of the growth-promoting drugs, and we haven't done a very good job of measuring the farm-level drug use and correlating that all the way through to the clinical instance of disease in people.

[Luc Malo, Bloc, Verchères—Les Patriotes, QC]

How is the situation in Europe different from that in America? You said the situation was complex. As I see it, the situation is equally complex in Europe. I would think the implications are the same for European animals. I simply want to understand in what way the two situations differ.

[Dr. Leigh Rosengren]

Go ahead.

[Dr. Gail Hansen]

I was just going to say that bacteria don't carry little lapel pins of what country they're from. So the resistance is the same no matter where you're at. Denmark, for example, saw some problems with some of their pigs to begin with, and that's why I said they couldn't just stop using the antibiotics. They had to figure out what else needed to be done. They figured it out pretty quickly. I think of Denmark as a success story, since they are the number-one exporter of pork in the world. They've increased their pork production 40% since they've taken out the antibiotics for non-therapeutic use.

[Jean Szkotnicki]

I happen to have the Denmark map report for 2009. I'm reading right from the document, so this is the Danish experience. It says that for production animals in general, the consumption of antimicrobial agents has increased by 59% from 2000 to 2009, mainly because of an increase in consumption of antimicrobials in pork production.

That's the removal of the growth-promoters. It required that additional drugs be used to treat animals therapeutically, because they were getting sicknesses. It's a complex issue. By removing some of the products from production, you don't necessarily eliminate use—in fact you may increase it.

Time will tell, as Dr. Hansen was saying. Certainly the resistance in humans hasn't been affected in the Danish experience, from what I understand. Yes, there's been a reduction in the animal population, but one would expect that when the use has been reduced. But did it change in the human population? After all, that's what these bans have been about, to get outcomes relevant to the treatment of humans.