It wants new legislation which prohibits feeding antibiotics to animals routinely and end the use of antibiotics to control diseases caused by inadequate animal husbandry and poor hygiene.
Cóilín Nunan of the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics said: “How many more years is Defra going to keep on delaying before it does its job?
“The government says that using antibiotics routinely or to compensate for poor animal husbandry is unacceptable, but its lack of action means that the UK is now one of the only countries in Western Europe where these misuses of antibiotics remain legal.
“Farmers and vets have already taken action to cut farm antibiotic use, but much larger cuts are still needed, and they are only likely to happen if the government introduces new legislation.”
The Government has still not published a response to its own public consultation, announced in June 2021 by then Defra Minister Victoria Prentis MP, which closed in March 2023.
Former Conservative environment minister Zac Goldsmith, now Lord Goldsmith, has added his voice to the call for action, saying the ‘industrial use’ of antibiotics used in intensive farming is being used ‘simply to keep animals alive in miserable conditions they couldn’t otherwise survive’.
He said: “The Government should stand up to ‘vested interests’ and avoid any further delay in banning the overuse of antibiotics on farms,” he told the PA news agency.
“It is hard to think of a more reckless and irresponsible policy and while other countries have taken the step of banning the routine use of antibiotics on farms, we have not, despite promising to do so for years.
“Future generations will be outraged that in our failure to stand up to vested interests and lobby groups today we robbed them of the most important medical advance our species has ever known.
“If people really understood the implications, they would simply be enraged. The Government must put the interests of its people first and legislate now.”
The systematic overuse of antibiotics in human and animal medicine is undermining our ability to cure life-threatening infections in people, by greatly increasing the spread of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. Scientists predict that 10m people a year could die from antibiotic resistant infections by 2050.