Antibiotic use in livestock: Time to act

Antibiotics, also known as antimicrobial drugs, are commonly used in human and veterinary medicine to treat a wide variety of infectious diseases.

Yet misuse and overuse of these drugs have contributed to a phenomenon known as antibiotic resistance. This resistance develops when harmful bacteria change in a way that reduces or eliminates the effectiveness of antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance is one of the most challenging public health issues of our times as antibiotics might no longer cure bacterial infections and common infections such as strep throat could once again prove fatal.

For the EU to effectively safeguard the efficiency of antibiotics, we recommend: 

• Restricting the use of antibiotics to therapeutic use;
• Making individual treatment the norm and herd treatment the exception;
• Decoupling veterinarians’ right to both prescribe and sell antibiotics;
• Restricting the use of critically important antibiotics;
• Implementing strict restrictions on ‘off-label use’;
• Testing meat products;
• Collecting data on the use of antibiotics at farm level.