Merck Animal Health said in a release Engemycin DD is a Category III antimicrobial drug. Antimicrobial drugs are categorized based on their importance in human medicine, with the highest category of antimicrobials reserved for the treatment of serious infections to preserve their efficacy and limit antimicrobial resistance. Because of this, the use of Category I antimicrobials in livestock is restricted except for extraordinary cases.

Merck Animal Health said as a Category III antimicrobial, Engemycin DD can offer a new treatment option in livestock. It is also the only short-acting oxytetracycline on the market for livestock, making it ideal for dairy farmers to treat infected cows and have a manageable withdrawal period for milk, the company said.

“The launch of Engemycin DD is significant, especially for dairy farmers in provinces where the use of Category I antimicrobials has been restricted in food-producing animals,” said Ray Reynen, DVM, Veterinary Services, Cattle at Merck Animal Health. “Engemycin DD gives producers a viable option where they have had limited choices for broad-spectrum antibiotics.”

David Wiens, president of Dairy Farmers of Canada said in the release “increasing the diversity of veterinary health care tools available in Canada is essential to positive health outcomes for animals and helping farmers play their part in reducing antimicrobial resistance.”

There has been a shortage of broad-spectrum antibiotic options on the market in recent years as products have been discontinued for sale in Canada. Merck Animal Health said it filed an updated regulatory dossier for Engemycin DD in February 2024. The Veterinary Drugs Directorate granted a priority review given its demonstrated need to the industry and Engemycin DD received market authorization in February 2025.

Engemycin DD is now available for use in Canada. Merck Animal Health said producers can contact their local veterinarian to determine whether Engemycin DD is suitable for the animal to be treated. For more information on Engemycin DD, veterinarians can contact their local Merck Animal Health representative or call 1-866-683-7838.

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On-farm protocols used by two “no antibiotics ever” pork brands in the United States include genetics, extended pre-weaning days and unconventional feed schedules.

Why it matters: There’s increasing pressure on livestock operations to reduce their antibiotic use, to help slow resistance to the critical medications.

Jim Magolski, senior director of hog quality and protocols for Niman Ranch and Coleman Natural Pork — both owned by Perdue Farms — was a co-presenter on antibiotic alternatives during the recent London Swine Conference.

Magolski said farmers he works with don’t seek to replace an additive with a different additive. Instead, numerous husbandry, genetic and dietary factors go into what he called “a full-system approach to give the animal everything it needs to be successful every day.”

• RELATED: New, aggressive disease strains challenge hog farmers

Magolski said pigs on farms that supply Niman Ranch or Coleman Natural sometimes receive antibiotics if the health situation requires treatment. Those pigs are removed from the no-antibiotics-ever value stream in keeping with protocols. They also have a strong vaccination program.

“Antibiotics are non-selective, so the good bacteria go with them,” he said, in explaining his justification for antibiotic-free as a strategy.

When he observes the conventional hog industry, in which approximately 30 per cent of piglets born don’t make it to market, it makes him wonder.

“How did we get here? … Sometimes we’ve got to pull the curtain back and look at how we’re doing things.”

Some conventional hog farmers strive for 18-day weaning, but Niman Ranch requires a 28-day weaning minimum with a bedded environment through all stages of life. Coleman Natural requires a 21-day weaning minimum.

Magolski asked for a show of hands on how many times feed formulations are changed in a typical pig’s lifetime. Many in the room said five or six. A U.S. visitor said some farms in his country use as many as eight.

• RELATED: Deciding which type of sow housing works for your farm

Reformulations are often done to use low-cost ingredients rather than serve the pigs’ diets. Either way, said Magolski, conventional feed formulation strategies are geared toward thriving pigs, not those at the lower end, with a goal to get pigs to market as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, this leaves a lot of piglets behind and contributes, at least in part, to what he sees as an unacceptable mortality rate.

The goal of his on-farm protocol team is to get pigs to market without using antibiotics. They typically offer four different feed formulations between weaning and finishing and try to match those with what’s happening in the barn as a whole, not just with the highest-performing pigs.

Another important strategy for the antibiotic-free brands is genetics.

“The Duroc pig of the ‘60s is very different from the Duroc pig of the 2000s,” Magolski said. That decade-by-decade transformation has not contributed to pigs’ disease resistance or their ability to thrive in the housing now promoted by consumer advocacy groups.

He says he is often asked about pig behavior and aggression in group housing, and credits selective breeding for reducing those concerns.

“We made some genetic changes about 10 years ago and it was a game-changer” in reducing aggressive behaviour under group-housing management.

Space allowances are “our top priority,” said Magolski. Coleman Natural requires 10 square feet per pig and Niman Ranch requires 14 square feet per pig at the late finishing stage.

Nutrition options

University of Manitoba’s Dr. Martin Nyachoti said at the seminar that the removal of regulatory approval for some in-feed antimicrobial agents meant to control post-weaning diarrhea has required adaptation.

Vaccines are crucial in any swine health program. But on top of vaccination, other additives that have been touted for their ability to enhance the disease resistance of pigs are probiotics, prebiotics, organic acids, essential oils, amino acids, enzymes and medicinal plants.

“Many of these technologies do have something to offer,” Nyachoti said. “There’s (also) a lot of interest into whether or not we can use some of these products in concert,” he added, because they all have different modes of action – as antimicrobials, anti-inflammatories, anti-oxidants or some combination thereof.

Probiotics are common in human health. And there has now been sufficient research to indicate they can also be beneficial in swine. They work by competing against the harmful gut bacteria for food and resources, by actively suppressing the harmful bacteria, or by changing the gut pH level to make it less favourable for the harmful bacteria to thrive.

Prebiotics are added to the feed to promote the growth within the gut of beneficial bacteria. They can also provide an alternative site for the attachment of harmful bacteria, after which this is flushed out of the gut. Many prebiotics are a type of fibre – again giving strength to the idea that maybe we need to increase fibre levels in the ration to enhance gut health.

Among the fibrous products that have shown promise in research projects for inclusion in swine diets are wheat bran, araceae roots and citrus fibre.

Knowledge is also building about functional amino acids, some of which have been shown to improve the immune status of pigs.

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The World Health Organization (WHO) has declared AMR as one of the top 10 global public health threats against humanity. It is estimated that by 2050, antibiotic-resistant infections could claim 10 million lives each year and impose a cumulative $100 trillion burden on the global economy.

The list of bacteria that are becoming resistant to treatment with all available antibiotic options is growing and few new drugs are in the pipeline, creating a pressing need for new classes of antibiotics to prevent public health crises.

“We took a creative, double-pronged strategy to develop new molecules that can kill difficult-to-treat infections while enhancing the natural host immune response,” said Farokh Dotiwala, assistant professor in the Vaccine and Immunotherapy Center and lead author of the effort to identify a new generation of antimicrobials named dual-acting immuno-antibiotics (DAIAs).

Existing antibiotics target essential bacterial functions, including nucleic acid and protein synthesis, building of the cell membrane, and metabolic pathways. However, bacteria can acquire drug resistance by mutating the bacterial target the antibiotic is directed against, inactivating the drugs or pumping them out.

“We reasoned that harnessing the immune system to simultaneously attack bacteria on two different fronts makes it hard for them to develop resistance,” said Dotiwala.

He and colleagues focused on a metabolic pathway that is essential for most bacteria but absent in humans, making it an ideal target for antibiotic development.

This pathway, called methyl-D-erythritol phosphate (MEP) or non-mevalonate pathway, is responsible for biosynthesis of isoprenoids — molecules required for cell survival in most pathogenic bacteria.

Researchers at the Philadelphia institute used computer modeling to screen several million commercially available compounds for their ability to bind with the enzyme, and selected the most potent ones that inhibited IspH function as starting points for drug discovery.

Since previously available IspH inhibitors could not penetrate the bacterial cell wall, Dotiwala collaborated with Wistar’s medicinal chemist Joseph Salvino, Ph.D., professor in The Wistar Institute Cancer Center and a co-senior author on the study, to identify and synthesize novel IspH inhibitor molecules that were able to get inside the bacteria.

The team demonstrated that the IspH inhibitors stimulated the immune system with more potent bacterial killing activity and specificity than current best-in-class antibiotics when tested in vitro on clinical isolates of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including a wide range of pathogenic gram negative and gram positive bacteria. All compounds tested were shown to be nontoxic to human cells.

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This finding could offer new targets for the development of new antibiotics.

The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the first to show that E. coli uses similar strategies to regulate gene transcription as other more complex cell types.

There’s concern around the world about the future effectiveness of antibiotics with growing resistance to multiple antibiotics. Being able to treat bacterial infections is critical to maintaining global health. There are few new antibiotics in development. Any greater understanding of the function of bacteria could be critical to finding a solution to antibiotic resistance.

Just like the human body is made up of organs that perform specialized functions, individual cells contain specialized compartments – such as energy-producing mitochondria – called organelles. Complex cells contain many different organelles, most of which are enclosed by a membrane that holds them together. Because bacteria do not have membrane-bound organelles, they were assumed to lack them altogether.

Stephanie Weber, an assistant professor in McGill’s Department of Biology, and her team are the first to show that bacteria do in fact have such specialized compartments.

“Our paper provides evidence for a bacterial organelle that is held together by ‘sticky’ proteins rather than a membrane,” says Weber, who is the study’s senior author.

The bacterial organelles described in the study are formed in a similar fashion to membraneless cellular compartments found in more complex eukaryotic cells (cells with a nucleus) through a process called phase separation, the same phenomenon that causes oil and vinegar to separate in salad dressing.

“This is the first direct evidence of phase separation in bacteria, so it may be a universal process in all cell types, and could even have been involved in the origin of life,” explains Weber.

Because of the small size of the bacterial cells they were studying, Weber’s team used an imaging technique – photo activated localization microscopy – to track the organelle-forming proteins.

Weber is now trying to understand exactly how the proteins assemble into organelles. Because they’re involved in the first steps of gene expression – transcription – she believes they might also be an interesting target for the development of a new generation of antibiotic drugs, which are urgently needed to combat drug resistance.

“Clusters of bacterial RNA polymerase are biomolecular condensates that assemble through liquid-liquid phase seperation,” by Anne-Marie Ladouceur et al. was published in PNAS.

This work received financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

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This has led to calls for greater control and monitoring of their use in both human and veterinary medicine. What is less well known is that antibiotics are routinely used in crop production and according to new research are being recommended more frequently and on a much greater variety of crops than previously thought.

The use of antibiotics to control plant diseases is not new. They have been used for decades on crops like apples and pears, after being shown to be an effective means of controlling some bacterial diseases. However the extent of their use worldwide has been little studied and is largely unknown.

A recent joint investigation by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), OIE, the world organization for animal health and the World Health Organization (WHO) into antibiotic use found that the numbers of countries that are currently monitoring the use of antibiotics in crop cultivation is very low compared to those monitoring antibiotic use in the veterinary and medical arenas.

Out of the 158 countries questioned, only three per cent indicated they had any kind of regular assessment of the types and amounts of antibiotic use on crops. This contrasts strongly with countries that have monitoring systems in place for human use (26 per cent) and animal health (23 per cent). This lack of data on the use of antibiotics in crop-based agriculture has led many people to presume the amounts being used were negligible.

The new research was an analysis of more than 436,000 records from Plantwise plant clinics in 32 countries between 2012-2018. It revealed that antibiotics, some of which are considered critically important for human medicine, are being recommended for use on more than 100 crops and in some cases in copious quantities and as prophylactic treatments.

The paper, published in CABI Agriculture and Bioscience, estimates that annually 63 tonnes of streptomycin and seven tonnes of tetracycline (both critically important antibiotics in human medicine) are sprayed on the rice crop in South East Asia alone. In some years and in some regions nearly 10 per cent of rice recommendations featured an antibiotic.

“There is a considerable proportion of crop advisors recommending antibiotics against insect pests. Either the advisors are unaware that they will have no impact on insect pests or they are recommending antibiotics as a preventative measure against bacterial diseases,” says Philip Taylor, lead author of the study.

The researchers found that 11 antibiotics (often blended together) are being recommended on crops grown in the Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, South East Asia and the Pacific rim countries. The regional variation is considerable both in quantity and class of antibiotic, but it was noteworthy that no antibiotic recommendations were recorded from Africa, despite the large number of records from this region.

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Indianapolis-based Elanco announced Thursday it has paid $78.5 million to buy Prevtec Microbia, which is headquartered in Montreal with facilities in St-Hyacinthe.

The Coliprotec line is meant to help protect pigs against post-weaning diarrhea (PWD) and related symptoms of infection with pathogenic E. coli bacteria.

Weanlings are at risk of E. coli exposure due to relocation, commingling, loss of maternal antibodies and the shift to a solid diet, Elanco said. Symptoms of E. coli infection such as PWD typically appear five to 15 days after weaning and can last three weeks or more.

Prevtec’s vaccine products are “particularly important in Europe given the (European Union’s) direction to phase out the use of the antibiotic colistin and zinc oxide, both among the ways producers’ protect against E. coli today,” Elanco said.

“Offering a full range of alternative solutions is particularly important given alternatives do not typically have the same broad spectrum of activity antibiotics deliver.”

Regulators have been weighing the availability of colistin to livestock producers since the 2015 discovery of a gene that makes bacteria highly resistant to the polymyxin class of antibiotics.

Colistin, a member of that class, is used in both human and veterinary medicine. In Canada, the federal health department’s Veterinary Drugs Directorate places polymyxins in Category I (“very high importance”) of its list of antimicrobials based on importance in human medicine.

As for zinc oxide, the EU in 2017 announced it would withdraw authorizations for the product’s use as a PWD treatment, citing risks from environmental accumulations of zinc.

Elanco, already the exclusive distributor for Coliprotec in Canada and Europe, said it will now “look to expand registration to other key geographies” and will bring Prevtec’s research and development programs into its own pipeline.

Elanco’s work with Prevtec so far “has been very successful and has resulted in delivery of an important non-antibiotic solution for swine producers,” Ramiro Cabral, executive vice-president for Elanco’s international business, said in a release.

“Our distribution agreement thus culminates in this exciting opportunity to provide actual and future vaccines to the animal health industry,” Prevtec CEO Michel Fortin said Thursday in a separate release.

Prevtec’s swine E. coli vaccine Coliprotec F4 has been sold across Canada since 2007, later picking up approvals in Brazil (2010), the EU (2015) and the United States (2018). Coliprotec F18 has been distributed in Canada since 2015.

Authorizations were granted in 2017 for the combination product Coliprotec F4/F18 in the EU and Canada and later in Russia and CIS countries.

Elanco noted Thursday it has taken other steps in the past year to “advance the company for greater success in the swine industry,” including the launch of Prevacent porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS) vaccine and a deal with AgBiome to develop probiotic products for gut health issues.

The deal announced Thursday with Prevtec also calls for a contingent payment of up to $21.5 million to Prevtec’s now-former shareholders in the first quarter of 2022 if “certain sales milestones” are hit in 2021. — Glacier FarmMedia

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A Nov. 13 official ribbon-cutting at the 70,000 sq. foot Stratford facility marked the second opening of a large-scale chick hatchery in Ontario in just six months, following the start of production in May 2018 at Woodstock’s Thames River Hatchery.

Before that however, the province’s hatching egg and broiler sectors hadn’t seen a similar development in more than three decades.

Why it matters: Healthy chicks are key to broiler farm profitability and that all starts at the hatchery.

Trillium’s leadership team says the new hatchery’s strength is chicks that have immediate access to feed and water in a well-lit environment, are immediately removed from the potential contaminants of broken eggshells and unhatched eggs, and therefore don’t require antibiotics to fend off infection or disease.

“The new technology in this building will make things easier for chicken farmers in Ontario by creating a stronger, heavier, and healthier chick,” said Perth-Wellington MPP Randy Pettapiece, as he congratulated Trillium’s leadership at the Nov. 13 ribbon-cutting.

The patented technology is called Hatchcare; eggs arriving at the facility from hatching egg farms are placed in specialized incubation trays upon which they’re slowly mechanically rocked under strictly controlled conditions of humidity, temperature and carbon dioxide concentration.

After 18 days, the egg trays are placed overtop hatchery trays with clean bedding, feed and water, and are vaccinated and transferred to a lighted environment. Hatchlings fall directly from the egg tray to the chick tray below, away from potential contamination by broken shells, and within easy reach of all they need to thrive.

Leading a tour through the facility following the ribbon-cutting, Trillium co-founder Murray Booy recalled his first time touring a Hatchcare-equipped hatchery in Nova Scotia three years ago. The neat part for him, he said, was taking the half-hour to watch a set of chicks hatch and fall to the freshly bedded tray floor. Most chicks take a few minutes to dry off, but “they start walking around, and they’re inquisitive. They find the feed; they find the water, and away they go.”

This marks a contrast from conventional large-scale hatcheries, where hatching can occur in less-than-optimum lighting conditions directly into the litter of eggshells. Only after the entire group hatches are the chicks separated from the shells and given feed and water.

Michiel van Veldhuisen, international sales manager for the Netherlands company that originated Hatchcare, attended the opening. Hatchcare systems have also been installed at facilities in Europe, Australia, the United States, Nova Scotia and now Ontario.

Van Veldhuisen said Hatchcare immediately decreases mortality in the post-hatching period, as well as contributing to a better growth rate in the critical first few days of life. As such, it boosts both animal welfare and the financial bottom line for the broiler producer.

As with other projects around the world, van Veldhuisen’s company worked with fellow Netherlands-based Viscon Hatchery Automation to provide high-tech monitoring of Trillium Hatchery’s pre-hatching environment. This includes a monitor that assesses the heartbeat of the post-incubation embryo to determine if it will be a thriving chick at hatching. The aim is to pass on only live embryos.

“We take out that mortality before they get into the hatchery,” explained Viscon general manager Bas Smaal. This enhances efficiency but also boosts hygiene by decreasing the number of dead chicks or non-viable eggs in the hatchery.

At the other end of the hatching process, immediately before the chicks are sent out to farms, the number of viable, healthy birds in each tray is again assessed, both electronically and by hand. The goal is to ensure each outgoing tray contains a uniform number of healthy, well-fed chicks. That minimizes surprises for the broiler farmer in terms of dead or dying chicks on just-arrived hatchery trays.

Booy, of Aylmer, is a former 18-year member of the Chicken Farmers of Ontario board of directors. He told the ribbon-cutting audience, about “a long journey” to bringing this technology to the Ontario industry.

“It was five years ago since Dave Brock (one of Ontario’s largest hatching egg producers) and I started talking about this as an opportunity.”

Booy added that they were driven by a desire for better quality chicks, and hatching egg farmers wanted to be able to take advantage of antibiotic-free and animal welfare-friendly niches in the marketplace.

That journey began with Brock crossing paths with the leadership of the Nova Scotia hatchery at a conference in Atlanta. That company’s chief financial officer, Doug Kaizer, soon became the third member of Trillium Hatchery’s founding team.

Booy said funding was secured through agreements with a group of 23 shareholders, a few hatching egg producers, over a dozen broiler farmers, and the rest representing interests related to the chicken farming sector but not actually raising birds.

A trip to the Netherlands was arranged, and eventually a deal was struck for equipment to be shipped to Ontario.

Current hatching capacity is 20 million chicks per year. There’s space within the existing building to install additional Hatchcare modules and bring annual production to 40 million chicks. On the rear of the Wright Boulevard industrial park property, there’s space to construct an addition of similar size to handle an ultimate capacity of 80 million chicks.

According to Booy, currently about 250 million chicks are hatched annually for the broiler industry in Ontario.

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The move by the world’s biggest fast-food chain addresses concerns that the overuse of antibiotics vital to fighting human infections in farm animals may diminish the drugs’ effectiveness in people.

McDonald’s becomes the biggest beef buyer to tackle the issue in cattle, potentially creating a new standard for livestock producers and threatening sales by drug companies.

“McDonald’s iconic position and the fact that they’re the largest single global purchaser of beef make it hugely important,” said David Wallinga, a senior health adviser for the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council.

McDonald’s said it will set up pilot programs starting this month and will measure the use of antibiotics in its 10 biggest markets, including Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and set targets to curb their use by the end of 2020. The markets cover 85 per cent of the company’s global beef supply chain.

Starting in 2022, the company said, it will report its progress against its antibiotic reduction targets across those top 10 beef sourcing markets.

Medically important antibiotics cannot be used to promote growth in food animals in the supply chain or to routinely prevent disease, according to McDonald’s policy.

The company does not expect the policy to raise hamburger prices, although franchisees set their own menu prices, spokeswoman Lauren Altmin said.

The Animal Health Institute, which represents pharmaceutical companies such as Merck and Co., said it supported “judicious” use of antibiotics and that drug makers are developing alternatives.

Merck did not respond to a request for comment.

Elanco said a small portion of its portfolio includes medically important feed-grade antibiotics. The drugs are used to treat conditions such as liver abscesses and respiratory diseases, for which there are not effective alternatives, spokeswoman Colleen Parr Dekker said

“It is important to ensure that policies do not move faster than science,” she said.

Bob Smith, an Oklahoma-based cattle veterinarian for Veterinary Research and Consulting Services, said farmers have worked to cut back on antibiotic use while keeping cattle healthy. The lack of alternatives limits their options, however, when animals fall ill, he said.

“We will need those medically important antibiotics in meat production for a long, long time,” Smith said. “We want to use those wisely.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration last year said sales and distribution of medically important antibiotics for food production fell 14 per cent from 2015 to 2016, the first decline in year-to-year sales since the agency began collecting the data in 2009. Chicken accounted for six per cent of the sales, while swine and cattle came in at 37 per cent and 43 per cent, respectively.

McDonald’s has an outsize influence on farm practices due to its size. It previously spurred rivals to eliminate antibiotics from their chicken supplies.

Removing antibiotics from cattle is more difficult, experts said, because the animals live longer than chickens and have more chances to fall ill.

Hamburger chain Wendy’s Co. a year ago said it would buy about 15 per cent of its beef beginning in 2018 from producers that have pledged to reduce by 20 per cent their use of an antibiotic.

“What McDonald’s is doing will hopefully start to shift the industry all together from over-using antibiotics,” said Matt Wellington, antibiotics program director for advocacy group U.S. PIRG.

— Tom Polansek reports on agriculture and ag commodities for Reuters from Chicago; additional reporting by Siddharth Cavale in Bangalore. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia staff.

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“The biggest thing for us will be not being able to sell penicillin, aramycin, the tetracyclines, scour boluses,” explained Stephen Hutton, owner of The Hitching Post farm input supply outlet in St. Marys. “It’s not a huge portion of our business, but it’s a portion of our business that helps us with customer service — people being able to come in and have a convenient place to get a bottle of penicillin and have it on hand to treat whatever might come up.”

Why it matters: The changes cover medications classified by Health Canada as “Medically Important Antimicrobials” (MIA), and are aimed at preserving the effectiveness of these products in the treatment of human infections.

The measures are all about preserving medications for human health, says the federal government details on the regulations. Overuse of antimicrobials, in humans and in animals, has been implicated in the rising number of infections resistant to antimicrobials.

The executive director of the Animal Nutrition Association of Canada (ANAC) said medications in Quebec are already covered by a similar rule under provincial legislation; in every other province, some degree of change will come into effect December 1.

Melissa Dumont added that the powers for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) to require veterinarian’s prescriptions already existed within Health Canada’s legislation. Enacting the policy effectively brings Canada in line with the EU, U.S. and elsewhere.

“We were one of the last ones (on a global scale) to go this route,” Dumont said.

For ANAC members by far the biggest effect will be increased record-keeping. Some feed mills, if their business is predominantly dairy where medicated feeds are uncommon, will be largely unaffected. But if they concentrate on poultry, hogs, or even beef, starting Dec. 1 they’ll likely begin requiring a lot more prescriptions from producers.

ANAC comprises about 165 members, representing about 95 per cent of the commercial feed manufacturers in Canada.

“Until we get (to the Dec. 1 transition), it’s hard to get a good sense of the numbers,” Dumont said, but she estimated the increased record-keeping workload could double for some ANAC members, and increase by as much as five times for others. “It’s going to be very significant for some.”

She added, though, that the livestock feed industry has had approximately two years to prepare for the Dec. 1 transition, and in most cases feed mills already have protocols in place for the collection of prescriptions. The same isn’t necessarily true for producers – especially small-scale or backyard operators, who haven’t necessarily benefitted from the advance warnings sent out by commodity groups or industry organizations.

“There’s going to be a lot of panicked people,” she predicted. “But we’ve been trying to mitigate that as much as possible. The biggest part (of the preparations) has been education – educating everyone within the value chain.”

Outlets such as The Hitching Post, classified under the legislation as “livestock medicines outlets,” will be out of the over-the-counter antimicrobial business altogether. Hutton says the overall effect on his business should be minor, but he feels for the producers – who will now be faced with the added expense and time spent in securing prescriptions for commonly-used drugs.

“They need to be prepared ahead of time so they’re not calling the vet for a prescription on the day they need feed,” agreed Dumont. “And maybe they’re going to have to look at other alternatives” that might include purchasing medicated feed through a feed mill, or moving to injectables or water-soluble medications.

Either way, she stressed, they’ll need to move beyond contacting a veterinarian only for emergencies, and instead develop an ongoing relationship with a clinic so they’ll always have a prescription on hand.

For small-scale poultry producers, who may have never had a vet, they will need to find one before purchasing antimicrobials again. That can be a challenge as the number of poultry and small ruminant vets in Ontario is small.

At the Ontario Sheep Convention, there were several mentions of being prepared for “Dec. 1.” Brenna Mckeeman, who farms sheep with her boyfriend Matthew Francisco near Rockwood, said that their being part of a trial Flock Health Club has been helpful in solidifying a relationship with a veterinarian ahead of the Dec. 1 deadline.

Another change coming into effect Dec. 1 is preventing pharmaceutical companies from listing growth-promotant claims on packaging of MIA products. And changes enacted over the past two years relating to the same legislation included the elimination of own-use importation of MIAs, and limiting what’s known as “compounding of active pharmaceutical ingredients” in livestock treatments.

The new regulations bring use of antimicrobials under greater control by government and regulatory agencies, but it also will bring more costs to farmers.

5 things to know about antimicrobial changes

1. A veterinarian’s prescription will be required for the purchase from feed mills of drugs newly added to a list of Medically Important Antimicrobials (MIA): supplements, premixes, complete feeds. Prescriptions will also be required for the purchase from vet clinics or pharmacists of: implants, injectables, in-water drugs, drug premixes for mixing in feed.
2. The Canadian Veterinary Medical Association says “in order to issue a prescription, a veterinarian must document that a valid veterinarian-client-patient relationship (VCPR) exists.” It’s not sufficient that a producer has visited and/or received services from a vet clinic in the past. Instead, it must be shown that a veterinarian has responsibility for making assessments and recommendations regarding animal health and need for medical treatment, before a prescription for medically important antimicrobials can be granted.
3. Livestock-related growth promotant claims will no longer be allowed on packaging for products containing medically important antimicrobials.
4. Labels for products containing in-feed and in-water medically important antimicrobials will include “responsible use statements”. The letters “Pr” (denoting prescription drug) will be displayed on packaging for all products for which prescriptions are now required.
5. Selling or giving away a drug with Pr on the label to another producer is prohibited.

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The prevailing theory is that the incremental benefits of combining three or more drugs would be too small to matter, or that the interactions among the drugs would cause their benefits to cancel one another out.

Now, a team of biologists from the University of California, Los Angeles, has discovered thousands of four- and five-drug combinations of antibiotics that are more effective at killing harmful bacteria than the prevailing views suggested.

Why it matters: The findings could be a major step toward protecting public health at a time when pathogens and common infections are increasingly becoming resistant to antibiotics.

The findings were reported recently in the journal npj Systems Biology and Applications.

“There is a tradition of using just one drug, maybe two,” said Pamela Yeh, one of the study’s senior authors and a UCLA assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology.

“We’re offering an alternative that looks very promising. We shouldn’t limit ourselves to just single drugs or two-drug combinations in our medical toolbox. We expect several of these combinations, or more, will work much better than existing antibiotics.”

Working with eight antibiotics, the researchers analyzed how every possible four- and five-drug combination, including many with varying dosages — a total of 18,278 combinations in all — worked against E. coli. They expected that some of the combinations would be very effective at killing the bacteria, but they were startled by how many potent combinations they discovered.

Some of the four- and five-drug combinations were effective at least partly because individual medications have different mechanisms for targeting E. coli. The eight tested by the UCLA researchers work in six unique ways.

“Some drugs attack the cell walls, others attack the DNA inside,” Savage said. “It’s like attacking a castle or fortress. Combining different methods of attacking may be more effective than just a single approach.”

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