The Chicken Farmers of Canada national supply-management
agency is banning the injection of hatching eggs with ceftiofur antibiotics.
“It is going to be in medical textbooks for as long as there are
textbooks around,” John Prescott, a professor with the Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph, is quoted in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix.
The ban takes effect May 15. The national agency and its provincial
member marketing boards will use their powers to penalize any of the
approximately 2,700 members who buy chicks from hatcheries that inject eggs
with ceftiofur.
The antibiotic is deemed essential for human medicine and recent studies
have confirmed that using it to inject hatching eggs increases the incidence of
bacteria able to survive exposure to ceftiofur – i.e. they are antibiotic
resistant bacteria.
Ceftiofur is not government approved to be used as an injection into
hatching eggs, but hatcheries were able to find veterinarians willing to
prescribe it as an “off-label use”.
It has taken the chicken agency more than a decade to react to a Public
Health Agency of Canada findings of a high rate of ceftiofur resistance in
Quebec in 2013 and in Ontario in 2014.
The veterinary profession and federal and provincial agriculture
departments have done nothing to stop the widespread abuse of the off-label
loophole, either in the case of ceftiofur or many other medications.
