Decreasing antibiotic use in food animals proves difficult to track

The UK pig industry has continued to reduce its use of antibiotics (aka antimicrobials), with the latest figures showing a 5% fall-off in the first half of 2020, reports the UK’s Agriculture Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), a statutory levy board funded by farmers, growers and others in the supply chain. The U.S., however, has also made progress in decreasing unnecessary antimicrobials in food animals, but the information is more difficult to obtain—and usually by inference—as there is no one agency that records the data.