Antibiotic abuse in animals posing public health risk

Chandigarh: Studies at Ludhiana’s Guru Angad Dev Veterinary and Animal Sciences University (GADVASU) show that quackery, self-medication, unprescribed antibiotics, low veterinarian to animal ratio, and inexpert use of antimicrobials have brought Punjab’s dairy sector into a serious situation and put public health at risk.
In Punjab’s agrarian economy, dairy farming is a major source of income, when the state is among the leading milk producers with the highest per capita milk availability. The animals have developed antimicrobial resistance, while the use of antibiotics in the dairy sector is also injudicious. It poses a great threat to public health in the opinion of veterinary experts, who have called for counter-policies.
For knowing the extent of antimicrobial usage, the institute observed large animal field veterinarians (39), para-veterinarians (28), chemists (16), and dairy quality managers (12) from three districts of Punjab, one from each of the three regions of Majha, Malwa, and Doaba. Mastitis, an infectious disease with inflammatory reaction, was most common in the state’s cattle, for which an overkill of antibiotics was responsible.
For 70% of the observed veterinarians, a combination of Enrofloxacin and Gentamicin antibiotics was the preferred drug for mastitis, followed by a third and higher generation of cephalosporins. Overuse of antibiotics was even in conditions that did not require this treatment. Most of the veterinarians blamed para-veterinarians and illegal service providers for this menace.
Legally, the para-veterinarians are not permitted to treat the animals with antibiotics, yet all the participating para-veterinarians had treated the animals by this method.
Also, 90% of them claimed to have used antibiotics for viral infections despite having no knowledge of treatment schedule. They halted the treatment once the animal stopped showing symptoms, so the incomplete course created complications. In more than 30% of cases, the first line of treatment had failed, and it was given by the quacks, farmers, and para-veterinarians. Too poor to take their cattle to veterinarians, the farmers had opted to self-treat the animals.
The observed veterinarians in this study claimed that antibiotic abuse will continue as long as these medicines were available over the counter. Para-veterinarians reported medicine shops as their main sources of the antibiotics, while the chemist accepted that it’s common for them to sell antibiotics without prescription.
Deepthi Vijay, Jasbir Singh Bedi, Pankaj Dhaka, Randhir Singh, Jaswinder Singh, Anil Kumar Arora, and Jatinder Paul Singh Gill published their study in the Antibiotics journal, concluding that: “Punjab needs urgent policies for improving access to veterinary services and their regulation in order to control AMR (antimicrobial resistance). They also called for improving the veterinarian to animal ratio.”