A leading infectious disease expert has warned supermarket food could one day become contaminated with superbugs unless Australia takes advantage of a narrow opportunity to avoid being driven back to a pre-antibiotic era.
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Austin Health Infectious Diseases Department director Lindsay Grayson, who was speaking at the Canberra Health Annual Research Meeting on Tuesday, said although Australia had regulations to test local and imported food for drug residues, there was no requirement for the foods to be free of multi-drug resistance pathogens.
Professor Grayson also said policing and testing schedules of antibiotics in food were limited and thin.
He said Australia needed to consider legislative action and the implementation of a national program to control antibiotic misuse in people and agriculture, warning there was only a narrow opportunity to avoid an otherwise inevitable "tsunami" that could drive us back to a pre-antibiotic era.
"Australia overall has pretty appropriate use of antibiotics so it's only used when it's needed, but we're not perfect and we still don't meet the World Health Organisation standards from 2007," he said.
"I think we need a tightening or an improvement in the surveillance system for when you can and can't use antibiotics in agriculture.
"It's crucial antibiotics are still available for sick animals but the issue is where antibiotics are not really being used for that purpose."
Professor Grayson said consideration should be given about whether controls that applied in hospitals could be applied in food production.
"In South-East Asia there is really rampant misuse of antibiotics in humans and particularly in agriculture," he said.
"We could do all these restrictions and all this care here in Australia but if we're not testing imports or applying the same rules as we do to our local produce, that's unfair on the Australian producer but it also makes no sense because Australians could be consuming produce that is contaminated if it was imported."
Professor Grayson said there was already evidence that travellers were picking up superbugs from food they had eaten while overseas.
"The assumption is that there is a risk that some of the imports are carrying these bugs too but we just don't know how big or small that issue is because we don't have any testing regime," he said.
"I don't think it's enough for people to say if we started doing this (testing imported food), we would breach all the trade rules. We should be testing our own produce as well."
Professor Grayson estimated Australia had only a window of three to five years to act.
"The analogy I use is that the bushfire of antibiotic resistance is running, it's burning large swaths of the world," he said.
"Australia is in a fortunate position at the moment, we have three to five years, in my view, to act. In that time, we more or less need to set up a fire break to try and slow the importation or bringing in of many of the superbug problems that are now being faced in South-East Asia and increasingly in Europe.
"We can prevent to some degree, that coming to Australia but we have to get our house in order and the key thing we need to start doing immediately is accurate surveillance to assess how big the problem really is."
Professor Grayson said in just two generations antibiotics had been so misused that the emergence and spread of "pathogens resistant to all available agents" was almost inevitable.
He said the rise of superbugs was a concern because some countries were already running out of effective antibiotics and no new drugs were being developed.
