Health Committee on March 8th, 2011

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

So then, if I understand correctly, we can expect to see some results shortly.

[Mike Dungate]

That's right.

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

Go ahead, Madam Beaudoin.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Thank you very much.

Thank you for joining us today.

I would like to come back to something you said earlier, Ms. Rosengren. You said you administer antibiotics to all of your birds, because they are at different stages of a disease and because you want to avoid having to use more powerful antibiotics.

Are you saying that antibiotics are administered to chicks as well as to adult birds?

[Dr. Leigh Rosengren]

It does not necessarily mean that they have to be medicated right through to market. By giving antimicrobials early in the course of a disease you can often prevent that bacterial population from having an explosive growth, in which case the bird's own immune system can come in, catch up, and take care of that, resulting in a healthy flock.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

So then, you do not necessarily medicate across the board when an infection occurs.

[Dr. Leigh Rosengren]

Pardon me. I think I misunderstood the interpretation.

In the poultry industry specifically--and it is different for beef and pork--when a flock is medicated it is on a flock basis. That's for two reasons. One is the feasibility of getting the medication into those birds, because they're housed in very large groups. The other is because of the design of the chicken. For most animals it's only a fecal-oral route for exposure to disease, but chickens also sample the environment from their cloaca. So we need to treat them as a flock or a population in order to get a handle on that disease.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

Does a healthy bird that receives an antibiotic not develop some resistance?

If they became infected and you administered a stronger antibiotic, what would happen?

[Dr. Leigh Rosengren]

Number one, the birds do not necessarily develop resistance, just as if you were given a course of antibiotics you would not necessarily end up with a resistant pathogen at the end of that. We don't necessarily have to go to stronger and stronger drugs.

There are prudent-use guidelines among the poultry industry that they have developed to mitigate that risk. So they're very conscientious about that. These are their only tools as producers. So veterinarians and producers have developed protocols to avoid that very situation.

[Josée Beaudin, Bloc, Saint-Lambert, QC]

I'm also concerned about something you said earlier, Mr. Prescott.

There is no one at the federal level responsible for monitoring antibiotic resistance. Yet, I think this is an important issue.

What are you proposing? Should the federal government be stepping in quickly, setting up a committee and appointing someone to monitor the situation?

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Tim Uppal]

A very short answer, Mr. Prescott, if you can, please.

[Dr. John Prescott]

Put one person or one group in charge. There are overlapping jurisdictions federally, which is the problem. There's the Public Health Agency and the veterinary drugs directorate and you need one person in charge. The medical physicians want that. The veterinarians want that. Then try to deal with the federal-provincial crack.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Tim Uppal]

Thank you very much, Dr. Prescott.

Ms. O'Neill-Gordon.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you all for being here this afternoon.

I certainly listened with interest to each of your presentations and found them very interesting. I was glad to hear you confirm that the CBC Marketplace episode was in great proportion misleading and sensational. I happened to watch that, and after I watched it I thought, is this really true, or is this just something we're kind of pretending?

I do have some questions. We know that when antibiotics are used in humans, it's solely for the treatment of a bacterial infection, while antibiotics are often included in animal feed to promote growth. Health Canada has approved a number of antibiotics for growth improvement in livestock. I'm wondering how long this practice has been in place.

[Jean Szkotnicki]

I don't know exactly, but I'm going to say several decades.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

Okay.

Of what benefit is it to the industry?

[Dr. Leigh Rosengren]

I hate to repeat myself....

Pardon me, Dr. Bergen.

[Dr. Reynold Bergen]

I'll start answering your question by taking a shot at the first one that was addressed to me 15 minutes ago, and hopefully my response to yours won't take as long to formulate.

Part of the reason it took me so long to come up with an answer is that I'm still wracking my brain trying to figure out what sort of disease my five-year-old or seven-year-old daughter would get that I would use ionophores to treat. The drugs that are used in beef cattle for the promotion of growth and feed efficiency are ionophores and they are not used in human medicine at all.

I think that's a really important point to keep in mind, that removing this tool from the livestock industry, whether it's cattle or dairy or chickens or pigs, is not going to benefit human health at all, and it will negatively impact producers and it will impact society as a whole. Because when you're improving feed efficiency, what it means is that you're using less feed to produce the same amount of meat. So it's resource efficiency.

Now, what was your question? How long have ionophores been used? Decades.

But there was another question that I thought I'd have a go at.

[Tilly O'Neill-Gordon, Conservative, Miramichi, NB]

How do they help the industry?

[Dr. Reynold Bergen]

How do they help the industry? I'll speak to the ionophores.

There are really the two points that have been brought up, and one is that if we keep animals healthier by using drugs like ionophores, we're using drugs that are of zero importance or very low importance in human medicine. If we can use those tools to keep animals from getting sick to begin with, that means fewer animals get sick, fewer animals get really sick, and fewer animals get really, really sick, which means we don't need to use the high-powered drugs to fix them. That's one benefit to the industry.

The other benefit is in terms of the growth promotion and feed efficiency. It allows us to use our feed resources more efficiently. We can get more pounds of beef out of the same clump of hay and grain than we could without using it. In terms of the ionophores, there is a health benefit there in terms of preventing coccidiosis, which is a good disease issue for cattle and all livestock, I believe.

But then one of the real interesting ones with the ionophores--I hope I don't get too nerdy here--is that the way these things work is they promote the growth of bacteria that produce a molecule called propionate, which is used more efficiently in the animal's metabolism. So I'm not going to go any further into that.

One of the classes of bacteria that the ionophores inhibit is a group called methanogens, which is really interesting, because they're the ones that produce methane. So by feeding ionophores, we are improving feed efficiency. We're having absolutely zero impact on human health and there's actually the side environmental benefit in terms of greenhouse gas, in addition to the fact that we're using fewer resources to produce beef.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Tim Uppal]

Mr. Smith, you have about 30 seconds.

[Rick Smith]

I'll be brief. Just to point out the obvious, the implication of my industry colleague's comments is that the situation is terribly complicated but that largely it's working.

I would just point out ways in which it's clearly not working. The first is simple transparency. If none of this is a problem, then why isn't the amount of antibiotic used in the livestock industry in Canada clearly available to the Canadian public? It is not, at the moment.

Second, if the situation is working, then how do you explain the situation of specific drugs, such as ceftiofur, which is administered willy-nilly to chicken eggs, which is important to human moms and kids? We have a study from Quebec showing a very tight correlation between ceftiofur use and bacterial resistance in people--not in food but in people.

[The Acting Chair, Conservative, Tim Uppal]

Thank you very much.

We'll go to Dr. Dhalla.

[Ruby Dhalla, Liberal, Brampton—Springdale, ON]

Thank you very much.

This is kind of topical and timely in terms of our discussion of it, because since that CBC documentary, our office has actually been flooded with a number of e-mails from concerned Canadians and constituents.

I know that when Mr. Dungate started off his presentation, he wanted to talk about the elephant in the room that no one wanted to discuss, but I can tell you that people are alarmed. They are horrified, to an extent, and they are scared.

I have a science background, but someone who doesn't have the background, which is probably the average Canadian who is going out to the grocery store and buying chicken, really wouldn't know who to believe. When they watch a documentary the CBC puts on, let me tell you, they are alarmed and they are concerned.

We not only have the report done by the CBC. There was a report written in the Canadian Medical Association Journal in 2009. We had the Auditor General in Ontario in December 2008, I believe. We had a director of procurement at Maple Leaf Foods. Each and every one of those individuals, or those particular media, have raised the issue of the use of antibiotics in chickens and its correlation with human health.

I find it ironic that Dr. Bergen was talking about the fact that there's no correlation, when I believe that Dr. Smith stated that in the studies that have been done they have found a direct correlation between cephalosporin used in chickens and its impact on human health.

I know that Dr. Rosengren was speaking about the fact that there are protocols between veterinarians and the producers in terms of the industry. But you also mentioned in the beginning part of your presentation that there are over-the-counter drugs.

Who's monitoring what is being used over the counter by these producers?

[Dr. Leigh Rosengren]

It would be CIPARS. They've had problems securing long-term funding to monitor it in every commodity, but CIPARS would be the appropriate government arm that would be responsible for that.