To fight the growing resistance of bacteria to today’s antibiotics, the use of existing antimicrobial drugs should be restricted, and new ones should be developed, European Parliamentarians said on Thursday. In a vote on draft plans to update an EU law on veterinary medicines, MEPs advocated banning collective and preventive antibiotic treatment of animals, and backed measures to stimulate research into new medicines.

“With the World Health Organisation warning us that the world risks drifting into a post-antibiotic era, in which antibiotic resistance would cause more deaths each year than cancer, it is high time we took energetic measures and grasped the problem at its roots”, said rapporteur Françoise Grossetête (EPP, FR).

“The fight against antibiotic resistance must start on farms. We wish to prohibit the purely preventive use of antibiotics, restrict collective treatment to very specific cases, prohibit the veterinary use of antibiotics that are critically important for human medicine and put an end to online sales of antibiotics, vaccines and psychotropic substances. Thanks to these measures, we hope to reduce the amounts of antibiotics found on consumers’ plates”, she added.

“However we need not reduce the therapeutic arsenal available to vets. This law aims to facilitate their work. It is absolutely necessary to encourage research and innovation in this sector”, she concluded.

Veterinary medicines must not under any circumstances serve to improve performance or compensate for poor animal husbandry, MEPs said. To help tackle antimicrobial resistance, they said a revised law should allow the European Commission to designate antimicrobials which are to be reserved for human treatment.

MEPs backed incentives for drug companies to improve existing antimicrobials and look into new active substances; those warning of the threat posed by antimicrobial resistance have frequently mentioned the lack of new products in development.

MEPs also gave their support on Thursday to a report by Claudiu Ciprian Tănăsescu (S&D, RO), amending another law to improve the marketing authorisation procedure for veterinary medicinal products, which is to be decoupled from that for medicines for humans.

The MEPs proposals will now go before the European Council, before negotiations begin between the two groups of legislators.