Study to measure antibiotic use

While the country’s sheep industry has always extolled its green, natural image with minimal use of chemical inputs, a new survey aims to provide hard evidence of the sector’s low use of antibiotics.

And farmers and vets are being asked to take part in a survey to help to give backing to the perception that the use of antibiotics in the Scottish sheep industry is low.

Last year, the Sheep Health and Welfare Group developed a system to benchmark farms and provide a national reporting figure on the use of antimicrobial products.

The survey has been developed by researchers at Scotland’ s Rural College (SRUC) to inform discussions, both at industry and national level, about the adoption and development of the procedures in Scotland.

Hannah Bishop, of SRUC’ s Epidemiology Research Unit, said that initially the survey would look at how feasible and practical it would be for sheep farmers and their vets to provide the core metrics suggested for the scheme.

She said: “Although we know that overall antibiotic usage in the British sheep industry is not high, little is known about the exact quantities of antibiotics used in sheep flocks.”

Bishop said that this made it difficult for the sheep industry to d emonstrate that usage in the sector was low and provide hard evidence that anti - bioticsw er e being used responsibly in sheep.

She said: “This is becoming increasingly important both to facilitate trade and to meet statutory reporting requirements at a national level.”

She added that the survey should take around 30 minutes to complete.