The practice was already banned in Europe, but not for imported meat.
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From Friday, April 22, no more meat produced with growth antibiotics in our country. OWe are not talking here about antibiotics for treatment but about antibiotics which are used in three quarters of the countries in the world to promote the growth of farm animals. Protected by these treatments against bacteria, these poultry, cattle, pigs, lambs, livestock spend less energy to fight infections, explains Jean-Yves Madec, scientific director of antibiotic resistance at the Health Security Agency of France. food, ANSES, which allows them to grow faster.
This practice is disputed: it has already been banned in the European Union since 2006. French and European breeders no longer use these growth antibiotics. The importation of meat bred using this method continued, which created a distortion of competition and quality between European and other farms. The main problem is that using antibiotics for animals that are not sick is environmental nonsense.
These growth antibiotics are harmful because they contribute to the emergence of antibiotic resistance: the more antibiotics we use, the more the bacteria adapt and mutate genetically to survive. This creates generations of more resistant bacteria, and the risk is that we end up with ineffective treatments in the face of certain infections. Because the medicine cabinet is not unlimited. You have to make do with the treatments that exist on the market and innovations are not so frequent: in veterinary medicine, the latest generation antibiotic treatments date from the beginning of the 2000s. They are already 20 years old.
In human medicine, it is the same thing. When we repeat that antibiotics are not automatic, it is also to preserve the effectiveness of our drugs
because with less effective treatments, there is a risk of being less able to treat bacterial diseases, which until now have been treated like pneumonia or tuberculosis. Antibiotic resistance already weighs heavily. European authorities estimate that 25,000 people die every year in Europe because of its consequences. Since 2010, this consumption of antibiotics in human medicine has tended to fall in France, but it remains one third higher than that of our European neighbours.