Cutting Antibiotics: Denmark Leads Way in Healthier Pig Farming

[unhappycamper]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/danish-pig-farmers-reduce-antibiotics-to-prevent-drug-resistance-a-933344.html



Many tons of antibiotics are administered every year to chickens and pigs in Europe, a trend that encourages the rise of drug-resistant microbes. But Denmark has shown how farmers can be made to abandon this policy of dangerous over-medication.

Cutting Antibiotics: Denmark Leads Way in Healthier Pig Farming
By Julia Koch
November 13, 2013 – 05:36 PM

Before Michael Nielsen goes into his barn, he first strips down to just his T-shirt, socks and underwear, pulls on a white jumpsuit and rubber shoes, and scrubs his hands with disinfectant. Only then does he check on his pigs.

~snip~

"We check on every single one of the animals, every day," Nielsen says. That's because in the kind of intensive livestock farming he practices, illnesses are unavoidable. Piglets catch diarrhea and coughs from one another, and the older pigs acquire bites and scratches in fights. Sows get infections if the farmer has to intervene in a birth, and bored young pigs bite each other's tails until they're bloody.

In such cases, Nielsen takes up his syringe and administers Duoprim for diarrhea, Streptocillin for infections. But only if more than a quarter of the pigs in one barn have diarrhea does Nielsen treat the whole herd at once by mixing antibiotics into their drinking water. If he doesn't, he says, there's too great a risk the pigs could end up all contracting the infection.

Unlike his counterparts in Germany, Nielsen is required to report every single treatment he administers. Denmark monitors the use of antibiotics in agriculture more rigorously than almost any other country, in response to concerns over drug-resistant microbes.