See our antibiotics timeline for more
In 1945, during his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Alexander Fleming warned of the dangers of misusing antibiotics. In particular, he was concerned that if antibiotics were used at low doses, this was more likely to bacteria becoming antibiotic resistant.
Despite this, in 1953, the use of antibiotics in animal feed, at very low doses, for growth promotion was legalised in the UK. During the 1950s, antibiotics also began to be used at low, subtherapetic doses for routine disease prevention, as livestock farming was intensifying.
In the decades since then, there has been a pattern of failing government strategies in the UK to tackle the overuse of antibiotics in farming.
In 1968, the UK Swann Committee was established after serious outbreaks of multi-drug resistant salmonella food poisoning were linked to the use of antibiotics in livestock production.
Read our report "Swang song" for routine antibiotic use, 50 years on? for more about this landmark review.
The committee recommended that all antibiotics which are important in human medicine should be banned as growth promoters in farming. As a result, in the early 1970s the use of penicillin and tetracyclines were banned as growth promoters. An EU ban on all remaining antibiotic growth promoters was implemented in 2006.
The same antibiotics, however, could still be used for routine disease prevention or treatment, often at the same doses previously used for growth promotion.
This meant the use of these antibiotics in animal feed continued to increase. By 2012, farm use of penicillin-type antibiotics had increased five-fold since the growth promoter ban, and the use of tetracyclines had increased ten-fold.
In 2014, total UK veterinary sales of antibiotics licensed only for food animals also increased by 4%, and total sales in of antibiotics classified as “critically important” in human medicine had increased by 3% to a new record high.
The Review on Antimicrobial Resistance, also called the O'Neill Review, was commissioned in July 2014 by the then UK Prime Minister, David Cameron. An O’Neill report, published in 2015, made recommendations for more responsible farm antibiotic use, including setting reduction targets and having strict oversight on farm use of antibiotics which are critical for human health.
The O'Neill report was welcomed by the government, and even by the farming industry, which indicated that politicians, regulators, vets and farmers were finally waking up to the risks of farm antibiotic use. Read our response to the O’Neill report.
Over the past decade, there have been significant reductions in farm antibiotic use in the UK and a number of European countries. In the UK, farm antibiotic use in 2023 was 59% lower than in 2014, and the use of the highest-priority critically important antibiotics fell by 84% over the same period.
However, far greater reductions can be achieved in the UK by introducing better regulation of farm antibiotic use and by making major improvements to the baseline standards for farm animal welfare.
In May 2024, the UK government finally introduced new legislation, which banned routine farm antibiotic use. Unfortunately, the new regulations still allow for antibiotics to be used for prophylactic treatments of groups of animals where no animals have been diagnosed as infected.
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