On a farm in Ranga Reddy district near Hyderabad, a clutch of chicks has just been delivered. Some 5,000 birds peck at one another, loitering around a warehouse which will become cramped as they grow. Outside the shed, stacks of bags contain the feed they will eat during their five-week-long lives. Some of them gulp down a yellow liquid from plastic containers — a sugar water fed to the chicks from the moment they arrive, the farm caretaker explains. “Now the supervisor will come,” she adds, “and we will have to start with whatever medicines he would ask us to give the chicks.”
The medicines are antibiotics, given to the birds to protect them against diseases or to make them gain weight faster so more can be grown each year at greater profit. One drug typically given this way is colistin. Doctors call it the ‘last hope’ antibiotic because it is used to treat patients critically ill with infections which have become resistant to nearly all other drugs. The World Health Organisation has called for the use of such antibiotics, which it calls “critically important to human medicines”, to be restricted in animals and banned as growth promoters. Their continued use in farming increases the chance that bacteria will develop resistance to them, leaving them useless when treating patients.
‘Growth promoters’
Yet thousands of tonnes of veterinary colistin was shipped to countries including Vietnam, India, South Korea and Russia in 2016, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal. In India, at least five animal pharmaceutical companies are openly advertising products containing colistin as growth promoters.
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Read more: *www.thehindu.com/news/nation...l-superbugs/article22597845.ece?homepage=true
The medicines are antibiotics, given to the birds to protect them against diseases or to make them gain weight faster so more can be grown each year at greater profit. One drug typically given this way is colistin. Doctors call it the ‘last hope’ antibiotic because it is used to treat patients critically ill with infections which have become resistant to nearly all other drugs. The World Health Organisation has called for the use of such antibiotics, which it calls “critically important to human medicines”, to be restricted in animals and banned as growth promoters. Their continued use in farming increases the chance that bacteria will develop resistance to them, leaving them useless when treating patients.
‘Growth promoters’
Yet thousands of tonnes of veterinary colistin was shipped to countries including Vietnam, India, South Korea and Russia in 2016, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal. In India, at least five animal pharmaceutical companies are openly advertising products containing colistin as growth promoters.
.........
Read more: *www.thehindu.com/news/nation...l-superbugs/article22597845.ece?homepage=true
