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
