Minimum use of antibiotics - chicken and turkey
Level: Spearhead
Increased antibiotic resistance implies a large threat to global health and constitutes an important sustainability challenge. Vast use of antibiotics in animal production systems correlates to the development of antibiotic resistance. The use of antibiotics in animal production systems should therefore be held at a minimum. The use of antibiotics for growth promoting purposes is prohibited within the EU. Treatment with antibiotics should not be given to healthy animals to prevent disease.
Details
- Type:
- Technical specification
- ID:
- 11247
- Group:
- Chicken
Criterion text
Products of Chicken and turkey must come from stables where maximum 1% of the flock delivered to slaughter during a 12 months period have been treated with antibiotics according to the definition of veterinary medicinal products in Directive 2001/82/EC
Antibiotics should not be used for growth promoting or disease prevention purposes, or to dampen expected disease outbreaks. Antibiotics must only be given to sick animals or animals in groups where there is a disease outbreak, after ordination from a veterinarian.
Verification
- Use of medical products to current flock, according to the Food chain information report from the slaughterhouse.
- Compilation of use of medical products via for example stable journal or medical records.
Proposed follow-up
Control at the production level, request documentation from the supplier for example:
Slaughterhouse protocol, stable journal, medical record or quality management system which includes number of treatments with veterinary medical products.
Observe that your supplier may need some time to acquire requested information and that monitoring of deliveries on ongoing contracts is done at least 12 months after the contract starts.
Subject matter of contract
Chicken meat with environmental and animal protection criteria.
Information about the criterion
The definition of flock is according to (EC) 2160/2003 Art. 2.3 b all poultry with the same health status kept on the same premises or in the same closure and constituting a single epidemiological unit; in the case of housed poultry, this includes all poultry sharing the same airspace.
Environmental goals
Motive
Vast use of antibiotics in animal production systems correlates to the development of antibiotic resistance. The use of antibiotics should therefore be limited where possible. Sick animals must however still be treated able to get treatment with antibiotics, but it should not be used in for growth promoting or disease preventive purposes. Producers who work efficiently with preventive measures for protection against infection and animal health have the possibility to significantly reduce their use of antibiotics since healthy animals do not need medicine.
WHO have published a list of critically important antimicrobial substances for human medicine as a guidance for the prioritization of efforts to reduce the use of those substances in animal production systems. Read more here.
Versions history
The version date indicates when the sustainability criterion was created or last updated. Last reviewed dated tells when we last checked that the sustainability criterion still is relevant.
- Current ID
- 11247
- Version date
- 2018-10-01