October 11, 2017

 

Antibiotic use in food animals bound to increase, says paper

 

 

Despite efforts to reduce, if not eliminate it, the use of antibiotics in food animals will continue to rise, according to a paper published in the journal Science.

 

From more than 131,000 tonnes of antibiotics used in food animals worldwide in 2013, the figure could increase to more than 200,000 tonnes by 2030, it said.

 

The paper's main author, epidemiologist Thomas Van Boeckel of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, said that while most countries have taken baby steps to limit the use of antibiotics in animals, loopholes in the legislation may still allow antibiotics to be used as growth promoters.

 

"If we are serious about antimicrobial resistance, we need more ambitious policies. Last year the United Nations General Assembly asked its member states to take measures to tackle the antimicrobial resistance problem. So we thought it was the best time to test if policies to reduce antibiotic use in animals could work at the global scale", he said.

 

He said reducing meat consumption to 165 grammes of meat per day-or four standard fast-food hamburgers per person-would reduce the global consumption of antimicrobials by more than 20%.

 

However, according to him, recent history showed that people in low- and middle-income countries who can afford meat tend to eat more of it, "so this can't be the only solution to the problem".

 

Cap on antibiotic use

 

Putting a cap on antibiotic use to just 50 milligramme of antimicrobials per year per kilogramme of animal product would also cut it down by as much as 60% even if this were applied to just China and the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation. At present, there is no cap on antibiotic use.

 

"The main challenge here is that if we want those legislations to work, they need to be enforced. And this means developing a surveillance system, which might be challenging on a global scale", said Van Boeckel.

 

A third strategy to reduce antibiotic use is taxing the antibiotics used in agriculture when they come out of the factory or at the point of import. "The idea-which is not new-is to make antibiotics more expensive so that farmers and veterinarians would only use them when necessary", Van Boeckel said.

 

"Imposing a 50% tax on antibiotics for food animals could decrease global consumption by more than 30%, and at the same time generate revenues from $1.7 to 4.6 billion, which could be invested into research for new antibiotics or improvements to farm hygiene", he added.