Stepped Up Antibiotic Use Surveillance Expected to Lead to Reduced Antibiotic Use

February 14, 2018 — 

A doctor of Veterinary Medicine with Prairie Swine Health Services is confident stepped up surveillance of antibiotic use in Canada will lead to a reduction in the use of these products. To help address the issue of antimicrobial resistance, the Government of Canada is moving all medically important antimicrobials used in livestock production to prescription only, eliminating the use of antibiotics as growth promoters and establishing and strengthening surveillance systems to identify new threats or changing patterns in antimicrobial resistance and use, in human and animal settings. Dr. Egan Brockhoff, a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine with Prairie Swine Health Services, says stepped up surveillance is already proving itself. [Source: Farmscape.ca, February 1, 2018 by Bruce Cochrane]

Clip-Dr. Egan Brockhoff-Prairie Swine Health Services:
"The United States did this already a year ago and so we're following 12 or so months behind them and what we've seen is a real significant reduction, upwards of 30 percent in some categories and even higher in antimicrobial reduction usage. There's really an opportunity there to save some money that we've maybe never necessarily needed to spend before. I think there's an opportunity to really focus on understanding why and how we use antimicrobials. We could see some antimicrobials pulled out of the system that really don't need to be in there. There's no question that we don't have a solid handle on antimicrobial usage in Canada in either the human world or the veterinary world. So this really creates an opportunity to better quantify antimicrobial use in Canada and that creates opportunities for education and interventions. We have a program in Canada called CIPARS which does a small metric every year looking at antimicrobial use but we really need to expand and enhance that program to really better understand where we're at."

Dr. Brockhoff says antimicrobial resistance is a growing concern and veterinarians and livestock producers want to demonstrate that we can judiciously use these tools at the right time and the right amount.