The 2020 UK Veterinary Antibiotic Resistance and Sales Surveillance 2020 (UK-VARSS 2020) report has recently been published, showing a holding level or modest reductions in antibiotic use across many sectors.
The Responsibly Use of Medicines in Agriculture (RUMA) Alliance Targets Task Force report published last year outlined three new ambitions, namely; 1) maintaining sizeable reductions already secured, 2) forging ahead with further significant reductions, and 3) for those who have further to go in their antimicrobial usage journey, understanding usage in their sectors.
Since 2014, the VARSS reports have shown how data on antibiotic sales and on-farm use has helped show national trends and formulate actions.
The key highlights of this year’s report include:
- The substantial reductions in veterinary antibiotic sales achieved in recent years were held steady in 2020, with a small change (1% decrease), since 2019, to 30.1 mg/kg. This is the UK’s second-lowest recorded figure for veterinary antibiotic sales, and represents a 52% decrease, since 2014.
- The UK’s livestock industry has kept up its concerted effort towards reducing usage of Highest Priority Critically Important Antibiotics (HP-CIA), which has now reduced by 79% across food-producing animals since 2014. Use of HP-CIAs account for just 0.5% of the total veterinary antibiotic sales.
- In 2020, the pig, chicken, turkey, and gamebird sectors all reduced their use of antibiotics.
- The results from the Harmonised Monitoring programme for AMR show a trend for decreasing resistance in internationally recognised indicators. There is a decreasing trend in bacteria carrying resistance genes to antibiotics that are critically important in human medicine. The substantial reductions in antibiotic use achieved by the livestock sectors and veterinary profession are likely to be behind the decreasing levels of resistance we are seeing.
The UK-VARSS 2020 Report, with the Supplementary Material and Highlights Report can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/veterinary-antimicrobial-resistance-and-sales-surveillance-2020