Sales of medically important antibiotics in UK farming in 2024 fell by 2% to 15.6 mg of antibiotic per kg of animal population, from 15.9 mg/kg in 2023.
Sales are now down 57% since 2024, but are down just 0.7% since 2022, when sales were 15.7 mg/kg.
Cóilín Nunan of the Alliance to Save Our Antibiotics said:
"We welcome the cuts in farm antibiotic use and reductions in antibiotic resistance that have occurred over the past decade. But unfortunately, progress has stalled in the last couple of years.
Antibiotic use in UK pigs is up by 19% since 2022, and use per pig is now about 5 times higher than in Sweden and 20 or 30 times higher than in British organic pigs. So clearly much more can be done.
New legislation introduced last year makes it illegal to use antibiotics to compensate for poor hygiene and inadequate animal husbandry. And yet we know that most farm antibiotic use is still occurring to treat diseases caused by intensive-farming systems.
High stocking densities in pig and poultry farming, early weaning of piglets, routine tail docking of piglets, and the use of very fast-growing breeds of broiler chickens, are all linked with higher levels of antibiotic use.
What is now needed is improvements to minimum husbandry standards, so that the new law is applied properly, and antibiotics are no longer used to treat diseases caused by raising animals in unhygienic and stressful conditions."
