“Zero not an option”: Antibiotic use in agriculture

and control is important for animal and human health and for food security.

As Scott explained, this debate is really about a contrasting set of values. On one side are those who believe that human medicine takes precedence over veterinary medicine and animal agriculture. They believe that using medically important antibiotics for growth promotion and disease prevention and control in animals is less defensible than using those drugs for treating sick animals, and that certain classes of antibiotics that are considered critically important in human medicine should never be used in animals.

“This is basically what you read in the WHO guidelines from 2017,” Scott said.

On the other side are those in the veterinary community who believe that letting an animal get sick is not only bad for animal and human health, but is unethical from a standpoint of animal welfare and animal health.

While people in the first camp might view using antibiotics in animals to mitigate the risk of a disease outbreak as misuse, for veterinarians, the issue is less cut and dry. They often have to think in terms of risk management, and what kind of impact not using preventive antibiotics would have on a herd or flock. Some veterinarians may overuse antibiotics because they are more risk averse than others.

“Risk management: At what point do you say that this is overuse or potentially misuse?” Scott asked.

But Scott believes there are common values that these groups share. They both agree that antibiotics enhance the health and well-being of animals and humans, that there is overuse and misuse of antibiotics in animals and humans, and that protecting the efficacy of antibiotics for future generations is a good thing.

Acknowledging these shared values, Scott suggests, can create an ethical framework for defining judicious use of antibiotics in animals, which he sees as a necessary step if we want to reduce antibiotics in animal agriculture. “I think defining judicious use…and promoting it in US agriculture is something we really need to do,” he said.

While Scott said he doesn’t have the answer for where disease prevention should fall on the spectrum of judicious use, he’s settled on a fairly straightforward position on antibiotics in food-animal production: Less is better; zero is not an option.

“I’m not a fan of streams of antibiotic-free,” he said, in reference to the growing movement in poultry production toward raising chicken without the use of antibiotics. He also believes that zero use of antibiotics is unacceptable from an animal welfare standpoint. “But if you don’t have a system-level view that results in overall reductions in use, you haven’t actually accomplished anything.”