91998E3582

WRITTEN QUESTION E-3582/98

by Alexandros Alavanos (GUE/NGL) to the Commission

(3 December 1998)

Subject: Ban on the use of antibiotics in animal feed

Scientific findings discussed at a recent international medical congress in Copenhagen suggest that the uncontrolled use of antibiotics to fatten up animals and fish and for medicinal purposes poses a serious threat to the human immune system and human health.

Since consumer health protection is a matter of top priority for the EU, will the Commission say whether it intends to take immediate measures to ban the use of antibiotics in animal feed?

Answer given by Mr Fischler on behalf of the Commission

(4 February 1999)

As the conclusions of the conference of the World Health Organisation in October 1997 in Berlin, of the Economic and Social Committee, of the International Office of Epizootics and of the conference on the microbial threat held in Copenhagen in September 1998 have underlined, resistance to antibiotics has to be regarded as a major, complex problem of international proportions.

For their part, the Council and the Commission declared on 14 December 1998, at the meeting of Agriculture Ministers, that it was essential to prevent the development of resistance to the antibiotics used in human medicine. This statement reinforces the opinion expressed by the Commission and the Council at the meeting of Health Ministers on 12 November 1998.

It is this general concern regarding resistance to antibiotics which led the Council, acting on the precautionary principle, to adopt on 17 December 1998 the proposal(1) submitted by the Commission concerning the prohibition of four antibiotics permitted in animal feed in order to confine their use or the use of antibiotics belonging to the same family exclusively to human medicine.

At the request of the Commission, the scientific steering committee is to deliver a general opinion on the question of resistance to antimicrobic agents, taking into account the use of these substances in human and veterinary medicine, in animal feed and in the plant health sector.

(1) COM(98) 763 final.