Despite public perception, anti-microbial resistance is not solely caused by overuse on farms, according to a study in the Royal Society Journal.

The study states that “animal population is unlikely to be the major source of resistance diversity for humans.”

Professor of Epidemiology and Veterinary Public Health at the University of Glasgow, Dominic Mellor was speaking at the Crichton Conversation event in Dumfries on Tuesday.

He stated that while it was important that agriculture continued to play its part in protecting the efficacy of available antibiotics, it was not solely responsible for their increasing prevalence in human medicine.

Instead, there is a far greater likelihood of resistance transmission occurring from human to human and animal to animal rather than between the two.

Antibiotic resistance is not one-way traffic from animals to humans. Of all the resistant samples looked at in the study, the majority were unique to humans.