Human vs Animal Antibiotic Use
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Overview
Veterinary use involves treating many animals with relatively large doses (per kg of animal biomass), so the total mass can be very large. Human use is more often reported in defined daily doses (DDDs), which count standard adult doses rather than raw mass; DDDs are the common global public-health currency for human antibiotic surveillance and are useful for per-person or per-population trends, but they don’t directly translate into tonnes without complex conversions and assumptions. This makes it important to show both types of metrics (tonnes for animal-sector mass; DDDs and DDDs/1,000-inhabitants/day for human trends) when comparing sectors.
What the numbers imply for AMR risk
Higher mass of antibiotics used in food animals increases selection pressure for resistant bacteria especially where antibiotics used in animals overlap with those important for human medicine. Resistant organisms and resistance genes can move between animals, people and the environment via food, water, soil and direct contact.
Regional patterns and hotspots
Veterinary antibiotic use is unevenly distributed: Asia accounts for the lion’s share of animal antimicrobial use (the Mulchandani et al. analysis reports roughly two-thirds of total tonnes concentrated in Asia), while many African countries contribute a very small share of the global mass partly because of smaller intensive livestock sectors and gaps in reporting.
Recent trends
There are early signs of progress: WOAH’s analysis covering a large share of the global animal biomass found an approximate 5% reduction in animal antimicrobial use between 2020 and 2022, driven by regulation, stewardship programs and shifting market demands in some regions. At the same time, reported human antibiotic consumption (as measured in DDDs in reporting countries) rose in recent years (2016 → 2023).
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