The UK pig industry has continued to reduce its use of antibiotics (aka antimicrobials), with the latest figures showing a 5% fall-off in the first half of 2020, reports the UK’s Agriculture Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), a statutory levy board funded by farmers, growers and others in the supply chain. The U.S., however, has also made progress in decreasing unnecessary antimicrobials in food animals, but the information is more difficult to obtain—and usually by inference—as there is no one agency that records the data.
In the UK, between the first of January 2020 and the end of June 2020, antibiotic usage in pigs dropped from 110 mg/PCU to 104 mg/PCU, making a significant step toward the 99 mg/PCU target set in 2017. This measurement is also known as the “intensity of antibiotic consumption,” expressed in milligram of antibiotic per kilogram of marketable meat.