Stakeholder position paper: dairy producer

Bacterial antimicrobial resistance is a problem common to both animal and public health. An important public policy issue is to develop and implement prudent use practices where antimicrobials are used. As policy develops, there are questions regarding the use of antimicrobials in animal agriculture and whether these uses constitute prudent use. A series of papers assessing the risk to the public health from agricultural use of antimicrobials have consistently concluded that risk estimation is hampered by the lack of data that describe the amount, types, and uses of antimicrobials in animal agriculture. The absence of information has spurred efforts to develop a framework to collect these data. However, the reasons and benefit of collecting these data should be carefully defined. The dairy industry, contrasted to other major animal commodities, is not focused on meat production but on milk production. Milk production is constrained by disease and antimicrobial treatment is a common management tool, but unlike many other animal agricultural systems where the value and safety of the product is measured in the future; the value of milk is zero when an antimicrobial is used in a lactating cow and milk must be discarded because of residues. While there are exceptions, e.g. non-lactating cow therapy, this difference results in antimicrobials being used sporadically and directed at therapy rather than prophylactic uses. In the dairy industry, antimicrobial use data and its consequences may exist in sufficient detail or could be estimated from existing datasets without the expense of additional surveys. Finally, the main food product milk is mainly pasteurized and all shipments of milk from the farm to the processing plant are tested for the presence of antimicrobials. This makes the likelihood of farm-origin antimicrobials or bacteria appearing in finished product very low. This suggests that the use and quantity of antimicrobials in the dairy system has little impact on public health. This does not imply that the dairy industry does not have a significant role in developing guidelines for appropriate and careful application of antimicrobials, but the effort and cost to collect additional data should be used to fund efforts that improve our diagnostic and managerial skills. These data would change the use of antimicrobials by decreasing the rates of disease and ultimately decreasing prophylactic, metaphylactic and therapeutic use of antimicrobial. These studies and outcome are as important to the dairy industry as to public health.