Labour MEPs voted today to ban the routine use antibiotics on healthy animals to help fight antimicrobial resistance.
Glenis Willmott MEP, Labour's European Parliament spokesperson on health, said:
"The continued widespread use of antimicrobials on European farms not only raises serious animal welfare concerns, but also represents a real threat to human and animal health. In Europe we are already seeing the impact of increasing antimicrobial resistance, for example with some of the world's highest rates of multi-drug resistant TB (MDR-TB).
"We support a prohibition of the routine use of antibiotics in healthy animals and believe that these medicines should never be used as an alternative to maintaining good standards of animal welfare.
"Labour MEPs are strongly opposed to compromising the public health in the interest of profits of industrial farming enterprises.
"It's also important that we engage in a serious debate about the sustainability of our current intensive farming model. Farmers should be made more aware of different biosecurity measures, good management practices and disease prevention tools available to limit the risks of outbreaks of animal diseases."
ENDS
For further information, please contact Shamik Das on 0044 7920 441362 or 0032 479 790053.
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