Kedgley Sue: Financial Review Debate 
Kedgley Sue: Financial Review Debate 
[Volume:607;Page:4150] 
SUE KEDGLEY (Green) 
: 
 Today we face a horrifying new epidemic of what is called severe acute respiratory syndrome caused by a mysterious disease-causing organism that is spreading rapidly and amongst other things is resistant to all antibiotics. We do not know whether this organism is caused by a bacterium or a virus but whatever it is the new epidemic is a portent of the horrifying and untreatable illnesses we will inevitably confront if antibiotic-resistant disease-causing organisms continue to spread rapidly around the world and in New Zealand. They are spreading to the extent that we will find ourselves—and are already finding ourselves—entering a post-antibiotic era in which we cannot treat illnesses with antibiotics. 
This brings me to the report of the 2002-03 estimates for Vote Food Safety. If we were to take the report’s totally passive reactive approach to the use of antibiotics particularly in animal feed we would inevitably find ourselves with a huge problem in New Zealand. Essentially this report supports the continued indiscriminate feeding of antibiotics to millions of animals in New Zealand that are not even sick. If we continue with this present policy we will inevitably have more and more resistance and therefore more and more illnesses that are resistant to all antibiotics. 
I would like particularly to focus on two sentences in this report that deal with antibiotic resistance. The first statement says there are no plans at present to test poultry in New Zealand for antibiotic resistance. The second one says that there is no evidence to date that the use of in-feed antibiotics in animals has prompted resistance in any human pathogens. What an extraordinary statement! There is growing evidence around the world—overwhelming evidence—that feeding antibiotics routinely to millions of animals such as chickens does cause the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These bacteria in turn can remain in meat such as chicken meat when we buy it in the supermarket and then can transfer into our bodies by way of uncooked meat utensils cutting boards and so forth. There they can remain and colonise our intestines and pass on their resistance to other bacteria. 
Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith 
: I raise a point of order Madam Speaker. By tradition the financial review debate is a wide debate but it is an economic debate. I have been listening carefully to the honourable member who perhaps should resume her seat while I am taking a point of order and I do not recollect her mentioning at all the financial review which is what this second reading debate is. She is rabbiting on about antibiotics and bacterial resistance which have nothing to do with the financial review debate. Although I totally support the broad nature of this debate I think a person does have to address the financial review one way or another. 
Madam DEPUTY SPEAKER  
It is a wide-ranging debate; it relates to finance and it also relates to the performance of Government. 
SUE KEDGLEY 
: I can easily refer if the honourable member wishes to the fact that a woefully inadequate amount of funding—in fact virtually non-existent funding—is being allocated to measure the prevalence of antibiotic resistance in New Zealand. Here in New Zealand—the member may be surprised to know because there was certainly no reference to it in the report—we have the equivalent of an animal superbug vancomycin-resistant enterococci established in poultry. It is a bacterium resistant to vancomycin the antibiotic of last resort. One would think that we would have money allocated in our estimates to survey chickens in order to see to what extent this particular animal antibiotic-resistant bacterium has spread throughout our chicken flock but we have no money at all for that; in fact we have no policy. We have a specific policy of not bothering to test chickens. But a very recent independent survey of over 100 poultry farms in New Zealand has found that 50 percent of chickens are contaminated with vancomycin-resistant enterococci. That is half of our poultry flock yet we are saying that we will not undertake random testing of chicken meat to establish the incidence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. 
The incidence of vancomycin-resistant enterocci is small in hospitals but it is increasing. Australian studies show that the bacteria can spread through a hospital very very quickly and the great fear is that vancomycin-resistant enterocci may transfer its resistance—and it has already done this in America—to the human superbug methicillin-resistant  
Staphylococcus aureus 
 which is prevalent throughout our hospitals. If that is the case we will inevitably have untreatable illness throughout our hospitals. So one would think that the food safety agency would deal to this very serious threat.