Experts say there is a lack of transparency around the way superbugs could spread throughout the food supply

A lack of transparency on antibiotic use by the Australian farming industry is undermining efforts to prevent superbugs developing and spreading through the food supply, an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist has said.

The comments from Prof Peter Collignon come as the UN general assembly holds a meeting involving all 193 member states to develop a plan to fight the threat of antibiotic resistance. It is only the fourth time the assembly has met on a public health issue.

Collignon said that while antibiotic resistance in humans through overprescribing of the drugs was part of the problem, the use of antibiotics in the food industry was being “widely abused around the world”.

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“There is a lack of appropriate controls in Australia for antibiotic use in food,” said Collignon, who has sat on a number of World Health Organisation advisory committees on antibiotic resistance.

“We know the US pork industry uses four to five times the amount of antibiotics as the industry in Denmark. In Australia we don’t really know, we don’t know which antibiotic is given for which animal and how much.

“In humans you need prescriptions so we can get that data but in food and animals we don’t know because there’s not the mechanism to get the data, and manufacturers cite commercial confidence.”

In other countries, third-generation antibiotic-resistant E.coli in the chicken supply has been found. In Australia, those same antibiotics are being used in pigs and cattle, Collignon said, though it was unclear how much.

“As far as we are aware it’s not used in chickens in Australia but there isn’t a law that says it can’t be,” he said. “If a vet were to start using it tomorrow in chickens, there would be no way for me to find that out.



“Perdue chickens in US produce twice as many chickens as the whole of Australia and yet they’ve managed to go completely antibiotic-free.

“They had to invest about $100m to do so but, by making the investment and improving animal husbandry, it was possible. So any argument from industry that they need antibiotics and it can’t be stopped is facetious.”

With Australians travelling overseas and produce being imported from overseas, the UN general assembly meeting on the issue would be an important step towards encouraging other countries to clean up their water supply and curb their use of antibiotics, particularly in livestock feed as an illness preventative and as a growth stimulant, he said.

Prof Lindsay Grayson, the director of the department of infectious diseases and microbiology at Austin Health, said hospitals and laboratories could also become more transparent about the incidence of superbugs. The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has been working on establishing a national antimicrobial resistance surveillance system as part of its Antimicrobial Use and Resistance in Australia [Aura] project.

But Grayson said while this was a “reasonable start” the detection of superbugs should be notifiable – that is, required under law to be reported to health departments. Currently only Tasmania and Western Australia have made certain resistant strains of diseases notifiable.

“In terms of how many patients were affected by superbugs last year in Australia, we don’t know,” Grayson said. “Many hospitals have records but there is no organised way this is collated. Many experts believe these bugs are so serious they should be made notifiable.”

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In June Australia’s most comprehensive report on antibiotic resistance was released by Aura, finding that, in 2014, 10.7m Australians were prescribed antimicrobials – 46% of the population. Australia is among the highest prescribers of antibiotics in the world.

The report also found that Australian hospitals had the highest rates of resistant enterococcus, a bacteria that can cause a range of infections in patients undergoing invasive surgery, in the world. In 2014 Australia had the highest rates of vancomycin resistance in enterococcus faecium in the world.

“On any given day in an Australian hospital in 2014, 38.4% of patients were being administered an antimicrobial,” the report found. “Of these, 24.3% were noncompliant with guidelines and 23% were considered inappropriate.”



Prof Lyn Gilbert, a researcher with the Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity, said while she and other experts had been warning about antibiotic resistance for the past 40 years, governments only began taking it seriously in the past five to 10 years.

“How effective the UN general assembly will be remains to be seen,” she said. “There’s no doubt the issue is now taken seriously but what action is likely to come out of this meeting is another issue.

“There are a lot of vested interests in this. But it does put pressure on countries where control of antibiotics either in agriculture or unregulated access to the drugs for humans is an issue.”

But Dr Pat Mitchell, a former pig farmer and the research and innovation manager for Australian Pork Limited, said the farming industry was aware of concern about the issue of antibiotic resistance.

She said Australian Pork Limited had recently combined with the Australian Chicken Meat Federation and the Australian Lot Feeders’ Association to develop an antimicrobial stewardship plan that she hoped would soon be signed off on by board members.

“We are people that care about and love our animals, and we’re all trying to make sure we’re all trying to make sure we use antibiotics as little as possible,” Mitchell said.

“There is no use for growth promotion or using when unnecessary. There seems to be this idea that we back up a truck and fill it with antibiotics and feed it to the animals. It’s just not true.

“We have come together off our own back to look into the issue and develop a plan.”

She said antibiotic strains of disease were often brought on to farms by humans, birds and feral animals. The industry was making an effort to record antibiotic use and minimise it, she added.

Guardian Australia has contacted the National Farmers’ Federation and Australian Pork for comment.