The Sunday Mail
Leroy Dzenga
Senior Reporter
SMALL-SCALE breeders account for 70 percent of the country’s poultry production, according to the Zimbabwe Smallholder Agricultural Productivity Survey.
This is both a good and bad thing. It is good in that more players have joined the sector. However, the growing numbers have seen the emergence of some negative practices.
Among the swelling ranks of new breeders are those who use unorthodox methods such as injecting birds with medication meant for human beings or using steroids to increase the birds’ body mass.
Animal health experts have naturally raised the alarm as this potentially creates fertile ground for antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
AMR occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites fail to respond to medicines, making common infections harder to treat.
It also increases the risk of illness and death.
Ms Catherine Sakupwanya, a veterinary extension supervisor in Odzi, Mutare district, told The Sunday Mail that people can develop AMR without knowing it.
Consuming contaminated poultry is one of the several ways through which one can develop AMR.
“We have had cases where farmers used steroids, or in some cases, abused medication to try and grow their birds’ body mass. When people are buying chicken, they look at the broadness of the sternum, and that has pressured some of our farmers,” she said.
“When a person takes medication in sub-lethal doses, especially antibiotics, he or she may fail to fend off sickness as the bacteria and fungi develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them.”
From November 18 to November 24, Zimbabwe joined the world in commemorating World Antimicrobial Awareness Week.
Ms Sakupwanya said some shops are misleading farmers by recommending antibiotics to reduce the mortality of day-old chicks.
“If human antibiotics are not sold over the counter, perhaps, the same should apply to livestock. No farmer should be able to buy them easily,” she said.
Government and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations have since begun teaching poultry farmers best practices.
Some beneficiaries of the programme admitted to misusing antibiotics in the past.
Odzi chicken farmer Mr Tonderai Bungu (46) said he had been rearing chickens for five years and it was only recently that he found out he has been doing things the wrong way.
“Before training, I had this belief that a broiler cannot survive without medication. We would mix the stress pack and an antibiotic to prevent diseases. So, the challenge we later observed was that, when we tried to administer the medication, the chickens would not respond to the drugs. This was due to the fact that we would have overdosed from the onset,” he said.
Even in cases where antibiotics are recommended, farmers need to know the management of long-acting and short-acting drugs.
These types of medication, however, have a withdrawal period, which is the time – about two weeks – within which they are unfit for human consumption.
Progress
The Zimbabwe Antimicrobial Resistance National Action Plan of 2017 to 2021 proposed harmonising veterinary services in the country to improve the regulatory environment.
The document indicated that Zimbabwe had poor AMR surveillance due to low capacity in laboratories.
“In Zimbabwe, there is a lack of meaningful surveillance data to help understand resistance patterns, prevalent organisms and guide policy development due to constraints in the laboratory testing systems,” said the document then.
“Only 25 percent of the human public health laboratories have the necessary staffing, equipment and reagents to perform culture and susceptibility testing on human samples, which limits the diagnostic capabilities of healthcare professionals treating patients and the availability of antimicrobial resistance data to guide clinical practice and policy-making.”
AMR is not unique to Zimbabwe; every country in the world is trying to find solutions to the challenge.
At a global level, the One Health approach has been adopted to look at possible causes of AMR in humans, animals and the environment.
Recently, Zimbabwe resuscitated manufacturing of the January Disease vaccine to minimise use of antibiotics in treating the disease.
The World Health Organisation and FAO have now secured funding to assist Zimbabwe achieve the goals listed in the national strategy.
In 2021, Zimbabwe secured a grant worth over US$5 million to finance the implementation of global agreements in AMR surveillance.
To date, all the 14 laboratories working on animal and human samples in the country have been upgraded.
They now have the capacity to test for antimicrobial sensitivity in both humans and animals.
This means, in five years, Zimbabwe has managed to increase its laboratory capacity by 75 percent to 100 percent.
No single district in the country is still sending samples to Harare as processes are now decentralised.
Dr Innocent Chabanga, the Department of Veterinary Services’ Manicaland provincial epidemiologist, said they can now test for antimicrobial sensitivity in animals easily.
“Our farmers, primarily, are worried that whatever they are administering to their animals is not causing any response. It is important for us to look at which organisms and which drugs are being resisted so we can share with the Ministry of Health (and Child Care). This helps us to profile patterns of AMR so that there can be a wholesome response with all involved organisations and departments,” said Dr Chabanga.
He bemoaned lax regulations at agro-shops and unqualified personnel who prescribe drugs to farmers.
Mr Leslie Mabeza, a medical lab technician at Mpilo Hospital in Bulawayo, said upgrading of their laboratories has helped them become efficient.
“Our turnaround time is now faster. Now we can do diagnosis to make sure doctors can be guided in their prescriptions. A number of drugs are getting resistant, so we are encouraging people to wait for lab results before treatment,” he said.
As the stakes get higher, Zimbabwe appears to be devising strategies to deal with AMR.
The journey, according to experts, is still long but the country is poised to minimise the misuse of medicines in humans and animals.
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