The Government's Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Dame Sally Davies, has warned that serious action must be taken to prevent antibiotic resistance in bacteria becoming a ‘catastrophic' threat to public health.

Incredibly, more antibiotics worldwide are fed to animals than to people, according to Dr Margaret Chan, Director General of the WHO (March 14th 2012). This provides huge potential for drug resistant diseases to develop in farmed animals and for them to jump species to humans.

Throughout much of the world it is common practice to give farmed animals sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics because this has a growth-promoting effect. The practice was banned in the European Union in 1999. However, many EU farmers are still using huge quantities of antibiotics, via a legal loophole that permits the use of drugs prescribed by vets. In October 2011, the Environment Committee of the European Parliament said that ‘despite the ban of the use of antibiotics as growth promoters, there seems to be no significant decrease in the consumption of antibiotics in the veterinary sector, which continue to be used systematically for "prophylactic" purposes due to unsustainable agricultural practices.'

This was a reference to the crowded and squalid conditions in which pigs, chickens, cows and other animals are being increasingly kept. These intensive regimes provide the perfect breeding grounds for numerous diseases and result in the administration of huge quantities of antibiotics to ensure animals survive long enough to make it to slaughter.