A Professor Emeritus with the University of Manitoba says it’s prudent to reduce antibiotic use in both human medicine and in animal agriculture.
Canadians have until September 14 to comment on Proposed Changes to Canada’s Food and Drug Regulations Related to Antimicrobial Resistance.
The proposed changes include tightening regulations governing the importation of active pharmaceutical ingredients used to manufacture antibiotics, restrictions on the import of antibiotics by producers for their own the use, elimination of antibiotics for growth promotion and a new structure to speed up the approval of animal health products used in other countries in place of antibiotics.
Dr. Rick Holley, a Professor Emeritus with the University of Manitoba says the more frequently we use antibiotics, whether in human clinical medicine or in animal agriculture, the greater the opportunity for resistance to develop.
As time progresses we are seeing more and more organisms that have the capacity to be resistant to antibiotics. We know that, even in primordial microorganisms that have been isolated from permafrost that are millions of years old, isolated in the Canadian Arctic, some of the DNA that was isolated was identified as being part of bacterial genomes contained genes that represented resistance to modern day antibiotics.
We know that they are natural too. But the issue is that their frequency is likely to be greater than we would wish by the more frequent use of antibiotics. So it is prudent to reduce antibiotic use in human clinical medicine and also in animal agriculture.
~ Dr. Rick Holley, University of Manitoba
Dr. Holley says, if the legislation moves forward, it will be consistent with legislation that is already in place in the United States and in the European Union.
