21 Aug 2017

AMR issues and brilliant service

In his latest Dairy Diary, Roger Evans discusses why farmers are not entirely to blame for antimicrobial resistance and reflects on the brilliant service he received when his dog fell ill.

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Roger Evans

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AMR issues and brilliant service

IMAGE: ellisia / Fotolia.

I must be quite clear from the start; I don’t fully understand what I am to write about – on the other hand, I suspect you do.

I’m not too worried, though – you don’t have to be very bright, as long as you are bright enough to employ bright people when you need them. That is why people like me employ solicitors, accountants and vets. Besides, I’ve never pretended to be a farmer with a fair bit of veterinary knowledge, nor have I pretended to be someone who got kicked out of vet school and became a farmer. It wouldn’t look good on your CV, although I do fancy the notoriety.

I don’t fully understand bacteria. I know they are all around us, that good and bad bacteria exist, and that it is important to identify which bacteria are causing problems, treat them specifically and not kill the lot.

Stress, particularly in young animals, can help bacterial infections take hold before they have developed their immune system. These infections, at an early age, can affect the lifetime production of that animal. I saw all this in a presentation. It was quite impressive and, like most ideas that impress you, it is fairly simple, if you do on-farm cultures that identify the bacteria causing you problems (we are considering doing these in our broiler sheds).

We can take milk samples to our vet to do the same thing for udder problems. This gives you the ability to target the use of antibiotics accordingly. If specifically targeted, the use of antibiotics should be reduced and the issue of antibiotic resistance in humans would also be reduced. That’s what it is all about – the use of antibiotics on farm animals should be prudent.

The finger of blame for antibiotic resistance in humans is being pointed at farmers. Farmers are used to this; they get the blame for all sorts of things – decline of species and destruction of the environment in all its forms. It is an easy shot to blame farmers; they are a minority of the population and it is difficult to fight back.

But are they entirely to blame? I think not. I am not adept at information technology, but the simplest of searches revealed I can self-medicate, if I chose, with same-day antibiotic delivery. Given a high proportion of the population are hypochondriacs, it is reasonable to assume a lot of self-medication goes on.

Gone are the days, I am led to believe, when the only place you could get antibiotics was from your doctor or vet – those two professions kept a lid on things, but the worldwide web has removed that lid. A lot of the ills of society can be laid at the door of internet access. When you are talking of human resistance to antibiotics, ills is an unfortunate analogy. I don’t fully understand the science of it all, but a common sense to it exists that is eminently sensible.

After every batch of broilers we rear (we call them crops), we clean out and wash the sheds. Our sheds are small by modern standards, but it costs in excess of £1,000 for contractors each time they are washed out. That is six-and-a-half crops of broilers a year, and we have to remove all the litter. The idea is for the sheds to be thoroughly disinfected, so each new crop of chickens gets a clean start. But I hear they don’t do this in the US, Canada or Australia. Each crop of day-old chicks is put on to the litter of the previous crop, and the sheds are cleaned out and disinfected once a year. What I don’t understand is, if they don’t clean and wash out after every crop, why do we?

Gomer Jones

After I lost my border collie – my constant companion for more than 10 years – I was dogless for 12 months. About 10 months ago, I was given a terrier puppy and, until he arrived, I didn’t realise just how much I had missed having a dog. Last week we had a normal sort of day; he was with me in the truck wherever I went. In the afternoon we went to the farm where my daughter lives and he had an hour around the yard. We then went to fetch some spares for the plough, took them to the field where they were needed and checked on the progress of some grass seeds. That was three runs he had in three different places.

Come the evening and we were in our customary positions – my wife was doing a crossword while half watching the TV, and I was half watching the TV and looking at adverts for shiny farm equipment in a periodical. At about 8pm, my wife said: “Where’s Gomer?” Gomer is the terrier; it is a Welsh name. His full name is Gomer Jones, after a friend of mine at school.

Gomer spends his evenings with us – either sleeping by our feet or catching flies. He is quite good at catching flies, which is just as well because, if you live on a farm, the flies just keep on coming. My wife started looking for Gomer and found him hiding under a table and in quite a bad way. He couldn’t stand up, let alone walk, and I feared the worst.

It was now getting towards 9pm, and one option was to wait and see how he was in the morning. Instinct told me that was not good enough and he should see a vet, and there was the dilemma. The vet we use doesn’t do small animals, which was one of the attractions when we moved to him. The local vet for small animals is five miles away. I know some of the vets there quite well, but we haven’t used them since my collie was castrated five years ago.

Nevertheless, we telephoned the practice and were told to get the dog there in 15 minutes. When we went to lift him into the car, we found a huge pile of vomit he must have done that afternoon. That was the first clue we had to his problem – he must have eaten something.

The vet arrived at her surgery soon after us and treated Gomer with two or three injections. The dog stayed on the table throughout this procedure – he was not held; he just sat there, which is not normal for terrier behaviour.

We went back home and, when I got up the next day, I half expected him to be dead, but wasn’t – he was not right, but was better. By mid-morning, he was fully recovered. My reflections after the incident are, what a brilliant service we received, late at night, for a very occasional client.

I can’t help wondering, too, how do you compare that type of service for animals with some stories about the NHS you hear in the media? If I’d been off my legs, like the dog, I have no doubt I would have had an ambulance and treatment, eventually. Is it just as simple as the NHS is overwhelmed with the demands put on it, and always will be.

I must confess, when we got home from the vets and laid the dog in the basket, I did look in the local evening paper to see what dogs were at the nearest rescue centre. I should have had more faith in what the vet had done; it does me no credit at all.