The UK Veterinary Antibiotic Resistance and Sales Surveillance 2021 Report was published on the 8th November and showed a continued downward trend on antibiotic use in food producing animals in the UK.
Since 2014, the VARSS reports have shown how data on antibiotic sales and on-farm use has helped show national trends and formulate actions.
Highlights of this year’s report include:
- While the years of dramatic reductions have passed, this year’s VARSS report continues to document downward trends in sales of veterinary antibiotics in the UK, with a small change (6% decrease), since 2021, to 28.3 mg/kg. This is the UK’s lowest recorded figure for veterinary antibiotic sales to date, and represents a 55% decrease, since 2014.
- The UK’s veterinary profession and livestock industry have also kept up their concerted effort towards reducing usage of Highest Priority Critically Important Antibiotics (HP-CIAs), which have now reduced by 83% across food-producing animals since 2014. Use of HP-CIAs account for just 0.4% of the total veterinary antibiotic sales.
- In 2021, the pig, broiler, duck and laying hen sectors all reduced their use of antibiotics.
- The results from the Harmonised Monitoring programme for AMR show UK wide surveillance of healthy pigs show overall improvement in resistance since 2015, including an increase in fully susceptible E. coli and a decrease in multi-resistant E. coli.
The UK-VARSS 2021 Report, together with the Supplementary Material and Highlights Report can be found here