Prioritising antibiotic selection in farm animal practice

The global threat of antimicrobial resistance is one that requires united action across different countries and medical disciplines. It is for this reason that numerous European agencies work together to share data and information that can be used to inform policy such as the ‘EU's One Health Action Plan against antimicrobial resistance’. This document outlines multiple strategies that the EU commission plan to use to support member states to ‘preserve the possibility of effective treatment of infections in humans and animals’ (European-Commission, 2017).

One of the many action points within this document is for the European commission to ‘develop EU guidelines for the prudent use of antimicrobials’. One such set of guidelines has been produced by the Antimicrobial Advice Ad Hoc Expert Group (AMEG) who, in 2020, published a categorisation of antibiotics which takes into account the need to use antibiotics in animals versus the risk of antimicrobial resistance to public health. Subsequently an infographic has been developed as a tool to support veterinarians in their decision making when prescribing, which can be found at: https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/documents/report/infographic-categorisation-antibiotics-use-animals-prudent-responsible-use_en.pdf. This tool has been based on the ‘potential consequences to public health of increased antimicrobial resistance when antimicrobials are used in animals and the need for their use in veterinary medicine’ (European Medicines Agency (EMA), 2020). The result is the categorisation of antibiotics into four distinct groups which should be considered every time a veterinarian is administering antibiotics to animals.