Thursday, January 6, 2011

Protecting the food chain: food safety, animal and human health and the use of homoeopathy in farm animals

ABSTRACT: Human health is related to animal life, health and disease primarily through animal food products and the safety and risks connected to these products. In other terms: the quality of the food produced from animal products (eggs, milk and meat) is important in order to maintain human health and be a safe resource for food.

In this paper, food quality can be described in terms of process quality and product quality: Process quality arrives from how animals live their lives, and how the food is produced and processed, and product quality is defined by the values of the food product itself (nutrition, sensorial), including food safety. In this paper, the relations between animal production with focus on disease handling and human health risks is briefly explored and discussed. Animal health and food safety is related to each other through the presence of zoonotic diseases, and the potential threats of certain substances in the food product such as mycotoxins, heavy metals, or drug residues, and through transfer of bacteria being resistant to antimicrobial drugs.

The potentials for veterinary homoeopathy is concluded to be linked to food quality and safety through a potential for gradual minimisation of disease level in animals, no transfer of antimicrobial residues or resistant bacteria, and through a philosophical impact on the way of keeping animals and systematically removing all obstacles to cure not only WHEN they are diseased via building up a good and healthy animal production system and focus on breeding, feeding, human care-taking and allowing the animals as much freedom of choice as possible in order to fulfil natural needs and natural behaviour.

The potentials for developing a good veterinary homoeopathic treatment practice is far from being fulfilled at the moment. Education among farmers as well as among veterinarians is needed, and the current conflicting legislation complicates the use of veterinary homoeopathy in the EU countries. The perspectives for using veterinary homoeopathy in farm animal treatment practice on a more global level seems very relevant, as much medicine is being used followed by severe problems with antimicrobial resistance and drug residues in many countries, e.g. in the so-called developing world. The perspectives of implementing homoeopathic treatment approaches into veterinary practice in e.g. African countries seem even more difficult than for e.g. Northern Western-European countries.

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