India’s Poultry Giant Venky’s Marketing Antibiotics For Growth Promotion in Farms

India’s major poultry producer Venky’s is marketing antibiotics to be used by farmers in ways that contribute to the spread of drug-resistant infections, reports The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

The report states that the company is selling products aiming at speeding up poultry growth which contains drugs vital for human health. Other antibiotics which are being sold are for “preventative use”. This practice is controversial as it involves healthy birds as young as a day old being dosed with drugs to reduce the likelihood of disease.

The World Health Organization has opposed the use of drugs for growth promotion and preventative use as it can reduce the effectiveness of the drugs when treating infections in humans. The TBIJ in its investigation has found that the drugs are being used in several poultry farms in southern India.

The use of antibiotics for growth promotion is banned in the EU and US and preventative use is banned in the EU apart from its exceptional cases.

Earlier in 2018, the TBIJ revealed that the Venky’s are selling colistin as a growth promoter. Colistin is a “last-resort” antibiotic owing to its importance in treating severe human infections and their findings prompted criticism which eventually led the Indian government to ban such use of the drug.

Venky’s company was founded in 1971 and now has a significant presence in India. They are supplying a number of the country’s fast-food restaurants including KFC. With operations in Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and elsewhere, the company is involved in various stages of the poultry production chain: it slaughters around tens of millions of birds a year; operates its own hatcheries, feed mills, processing plants and farms; and sells birds to contract farmers who rear them for meat processing. The company apart from this also sells medicines, vaccines and farm equipments.

Through the investigation, it has been found that the company is also marketing a number of products containing vital medicines, both for preventative use and as growth promoters.

Venky’s medicated poultry feed Tylomix, which is listed on its website, contains the antibiotic tylosin, part of the macrolide class of drugs classified by the WHO as “critically important” to human medicine.

The overuse of antibiotics on farms around the world has led to the spread of drug-resistant foodborne diseases, including salmonella, E Coli and campylobacter, which can be spread via contaminated meat and other food products.

The company has not yet responded regarding the recent finding, says TBIJ.