Kashmir gets 1 crore live chicken from states using heavy antibiotics in farms

Srinagar, Mar 04: Each year, Kashmir gets around one crore live chicken from Jammu, Haryana, and Punjab, where the birds are majorly raised on antibiotics.
As per the information revealed by Dr Altaf Geelani, Assistant Manager Care of Poultry Organisation, around “25 per cent of four crore chicken” consumed in the Valley annually comes from outside.
A Delhi-based research firm, Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) carried out a research that showed “high multidrug resistance” in poultry farms in Haryana and Punjab.
“Antibiotics were used in all the farms,” states the research paper. “All the samples collected were subjected to their microbial analysis for the isolation of (bacteria like) Escherichia coli, Klebsiella sp. and Staphylococcus sp. These bacteria were selected due to their relevance to public health.”
“All the E. coli isolated was found resistant to meropenem antibiotic, which is a last-resort antibiotic class used in hospitals, also classified as high priority and critically important by the World Health Organisation (WHO).”
Other antibiotics of high resistance used in several hospitals and clinics in the Valley were also found.
As per the CSE experts, when such high resistant antibiotics get transmitted to the human body through the consumed chicken, it becomes dangerous and a threat to human health.
Even as there is no specific data that could show the damage or suffering of lives in India or J&K due to such high-level antibiotics, the CSE research reveals that America, which is considered as the largest user of antibiotics for animal food production, sees more than two million people suffering antibiotic resistance-related illnesses every year, of which 23,000 succumb to the disease.
Dr Mir Umar Qualla, a researcher in veterinary microbiology and immunology at SKUAST-K, defined these antibiotic-resistant bacteria, as an “ordinary bacteria with extraordinary power”.
As per Qualla, consumption of chicken which has antibiotics is so harmful that they at times they become “hard to be treated, or even untreatable”, as they fail to respond to conventionally prescribed antibiotics.
“When you eat chicken sourced from poultry raised on growth promoters, you ingest antibiotic-resistant bacteria that were harboured within the chicken, making you critically ill,” she warned.
While the suppliers say that boiling kills all the bacteria, Dr Qualla differs.
“No. Heating doesn’t break down all of the antibiotic residues that may have remained within the meat. Some are left behind, and those are the dangerous ones,” she said.
Interestingly, despite such high demerits of using antibiotic resistant in poultry farms, there isn’t any legal regulation by the government on controlling or even moderating the sales of antibiotics in India.
However, Dr Geelani assured that high resistant antibiotics are not used by the farmers in Kashmir.
“Antibiotics are used under extreme circumstances when the bird is sick and can die. A farmer rears the bird for making a profit for earning, and if the bird gets sick and the farmer doesn’t give the needed antibiotic, his bird will die, which is a loss for him,” he explained.
“Feeding antibiotics to birds is similar to giving medicines to humans. It’s given only for the purpose of survival.”
As per Geelani, only those antibiotics that have “least drug withdrawal time” are given to the birds.
“The drug withdrawal time of the antibiotics used by the farmers here in the valley range from 24 hours to maximum of seven days,” he said. “Hence, to be on a safer side, the antibiotic is not given after the bird is 24-days-old.”
Geelani also said that the antibiotics used in the poultry farms in Kashmir are “safe as all the residues get washed off” by the time it’s available for consumption.
“Most of the antibiotics that are used as Anti-Growth Promoters (AGP) in the birds are not used by the doctors to treat human beings. We are careful, and I am aware of its usage,” he said.