AIC hails significant industry progress on tackling antimicrobial resistance
The AIC has hailed the UK livestock sector's strong progress on cutting antibiotics use and tackling antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as a major achievement.
Overall sales of antibiotics for use in livestock have reduced by 55% since 2014 to the lowest level ever recorded, according to the Veterinary Antimicrobial Resistance and Sales Surveillance (VARSS) 2021 report published last month by the Veterinary Medicines Directorate.
Sales of Highest Priority Critically Important Antibiotics (HP-CIAs) in food-producing animals accounted for just 0.4% of total sales last year, falling by almost a fifth since 2020.
James McCulloch, the AIC's Head of Animal Feed, said: "The AIC welcomes the progress reported and remains committed to playing its part in helping the livestock sector meet future targets."
Dr Kitty Healey, Head of Antimicrobial Resistance Policy and Surveillance Team at the VMD said: "AMR is, and has always been, a threat whose reach extends within and across sectors in complex ways.
"It is only by working together that we can hope to better understand how our efforts to tackle AMR in one sector affect the whole picture."
International praise
Meanwhile, a separate report by the RUMA Targets Task Force [PDF] revealed that UK livestock sectors continue to make positive progress on antibiotic use targets, with UK efforts on AMR being recognised at a global level.
The collective voluntary effort by the UK agriculture industry to drive positive change has been praised in the recently released Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations report: "Tackling Antimicrobial Resistance in Food-Producing Animals" [PDF], produced in conjunction with the VMD.
In 2020 the UK ranked seventh out of 31 European countries on having the lowest quantity of antibiotics sold for use in food-producing animals, as reported by European Surveillance of Veterinary Antimicrobial Consumption (ESVAC).
Find out more about the UK's efforts to tackle AMR.
Author
Oli Hill
As Head of Communications, Oli creates and oversees the content published on AIC's website, emails, Member briefings, print publications, and social media. A qualified multimedia journalist, he previously spent six years working at Farmers Weekly magazine as a Senior Reporter on the arable team, and latterly as Community Editor. More recently he was Communications Manager at Red Tractor.
