I was surprised to hear about this. I'd thought that UK cattle(organic/grassfed, anyway) were never fed antibiotics or growth-hormones. And this stuff you mention re the Codex Alimentarius seems to be wrong, given the statement below:-
"The Codex meeting also agreed to new guidelines for organic livestock production. According to these guidelines, organic livestock farming should aim to use natural breeding methods, minimize stress in animals, prevent disease, and progressively eliminate the use of certain chemical veterinary drugs, including antibiotics. Animals should mainly be fed with high quality organic feed, not meat and bone meal, although fish and milk products are acceptable. The use of growth hormones is not permitted."
taken from:-
http://www.who.int/inf-pr-2001/en/pr2001-33.html
OK, it's from 2001, but I don't see how they could have changed it all. Plus, organic farmers/consumers would be UP IN ARMS if growth-hormones really were going to be allowed to be used on UK organic-raised cattle.
i really have a hard time believing anything like that, its usually riddled with loopholes and whatnot. i believe things like this are baby step operations, like they wont just go and ban all organic stuff and demand farms use antibiotics, but itll be much slower, usually initiated by conditioning the publics opinion that certain things are bad(vitamins, supplements) and other things are good(GMO etc), all media is bought off pretty easy, so any well established magazine/paper could write articles full of lies and pass it off as reality(see popular mechanics issue on debunking alternative 9/11 theorys, or anything that says that Flouride is good for your teeth), and people will believe anything if its written in a newspaper or on the news, and we all know about the news.
i think the worst part of Codex is that it will be illegal for farmers to keep there own seeds(!!!)
it will be mandatory to purchase your seeds off of Monsanto(i think it may have been bought/merged with GE??), which are genetically modified with so-called "terminator-genes" that dont allow the plant to produce more seeds.
and guess what theyll be feeding livestock? thats right, pure, adulterated, GMO, Terminator-gene Grains, yippee! thatll be healthy.