The Department of Agriculture is to monitor vets who over-prescribe medicines through a vet medicine prescription database next year, the Irish Farmers Journal can reveal.
The database will serve as part of Department efforts to tackle those in the veterinary profession who are not following best practice when prescribing medicines, superintending veterinary inspector Caroline Garvan has said.
The comments came during the VirtualVet strategies for agri-food industry webinar, where viewers heard that the level of antibiotic use on Irish farms is not reducing at the rate required by the Department.
Incoming regulations
Garvan said: “We will have regulatory controls coming down the line in order to reduce the use of antibiotics and achieve tangible results.
“Understanding the drivers of antibiotics is what is needed to influence use and behaviour. New regulations which will require a prescription to supply medicines from 2022 will mean vets will also have to justify their use.”
Meanwhile, Irish Pharmacy Union (IPU) representative Darragh Quinn has warned that the new rules could result in a cost inflation of 200% for various veterinary medicines.
Cutting completely
Also speaking at the VirtualVet webinar, professor in veterinary epidemiology at Ghent University Jeroen Dewulf said the solution to avoiding potential resistance will come from using as little antimicrobials as possible.
“In future, if you want to keep your license to produce food, farmers need to shift production to a system where they use no antibiotics at all. Hurdles to use them should be much bigger and shouldn’t be easy or cheap to buy.
“On the research front, we have to get away from microbiology and go towards the field, getting to the bottom of why we use antibiotics and the behaviours behind it.”
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The Department of Agriculture is to monitor vets who over-prescribe medicines through a vet medicine prescription database next year, the Irish Farmers Journal can reveal.
The database will serve as part of Department efforts to tackle those in the veterinary profession who are not following best practice when prescribing medicines, superintending veterinary inspector Caroline Garvan has said.
The comments came during the VirtualVet strategies for agri-food industry webinar, where viewers heard that the level of antibiotic use on Irish farms is not reducing at the rate required by the Department.
Incoming regulations
Garvan said: “We will have regulatory controls coming down the line in order to reduce the use of antibiotics and achieve tangible results.
“Understanding the drivers of antibiotics is what is needed to influence use and behaviour. New regulations which will require a prescription to supply medicines from 2022 will mean vets will also have to justify their use.”
Meanwhile, Irish Pharmacy Union (IPU) representative Darragh Quinn has warned that the new rules could result in a cost inflation of 200% for various veterinary medicines.
Cutting completely
Also speaking at the VirtualVet webinar, professor in veterinary epidemiology at Ghent University Jeroen Dewulf said the solution to avoiding potential resistance will come from using as little antimicrobials as possible.
“In future, if you want to keep your license to produce food, farmers need to shift production to a system where they use no antibiotics at all. Hurdles to use them should be much bigger and shouldn’t be easy or cheap to buy.
“On the research front, we have to get away from microbiology and go towards the field, getting to the bottom of why we use antibiotics and the behaviours behind it.”
Read more
Farmers face 200% hike in vet medicine cost
Weekly Podcast: rising TB costs and new animal medicine rules
Anger over veterinary medicine changes
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