Day 113 - 03 Apr 95 - Page 62


     
     1   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  You carry on asking your questions about it.
     2        If when we come back in the morning you can point me to any
     3        particular part or parts of Mr. Bowes' evidence which you
     4        particularly rely on as a demonstration he could not know
     5        about a large proportion of pigs, do so.  Do not spend a
     6        lot of time overnight hunting for it because you can do it
     7        in the future at some stage, but if you can find it readily
     8        give me the reference in the morning and I will
     9        particularly look at that again.
    10
    11   MR. MORRIS:  Let us try to finish off.  What is the problem with
    12        castration as far as the piglets it happens to is
    13        concerned?
    14        A.  They do not like it.  It is painful.  It is liable to
    15        get diseased and so antibiotics are often used for that
    16        purpose.  Perhaps I will refer to something about
    17        antibiotics and the definition which I made before because
    18        it is quite obvious from the interjections there may be
    19        some confusion.  A number of antibiotics are so commonly
    20        used by farmers, and particularly pig farmers, that they
    21        regard them as growth additives, growth boosters, than as
    22        antibiotics themselves.  This applies particularly to the
    23        sulphur drugs.  These are drugs like those of Winston
    24        Churchhill used in the last war when he had pneumonia, they
    25        were newly developed then.  They are used particularly on
    26        pigs that suffer from respiratory and gut troubles.  Of
    27        course, with such a short span of life, and this is where
    28        pigs do differ a bit from cattle, if you lose a week of
    29        production because the animals are ill, that is very
    30        expensive.  So certain drugs, one trade name drug is
    31        Tylasul, T-Y-L-A-S-U-L, which is so-called potentiated
    32        sulphur drug.  That means it is a sulphur drug mixed with
    33        another antibiotic.
    34
    35        I mention this because we have got figures from the
    36        Ministry over the last, well, over the last six or seven
    37        years where sulphur drug residues have exceeded the MRLs
    38        over all these years, and the latest figure is about a
    39        3 per cent infringement rate.  I might say that this
    40        problem is not common not to UK; it is also common in the
    41        USA.  In fact, the use of sulphur drugs in this way is
    42        actually forbidden in Denmark.
    43
    44        The problem with them is -----
    45
    46   Q.   Why is it forbidden?
    47        A.  It is forbidden because the residues turn up and
    48        sulphur drugs are not very pleasant.  If certain people are
    49        very highly sensitive, you could call it allergy if you
    50        like, there is a medical condition if you want to know 
    51        called Stephens Johnsons Syndrome, which is coming out in a 
    52        rash and fevers, low blood pressure and so on, which is a 
    53        strong adverse reaction to these drugs.  Therefore, it is
    54        important they are very carefully monitored.  It is a sign
    55        of bad husbandry that the MRLs over these years have been
    56        exceeded.
    57
    58        What I would say is that in the last 10 years or so the
    59        number of cases of excess, of exceeding the limits, have
    60        gone down.  I think at their highest they were about seven

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