Estimates of on‐farm antimicrobial usage in turkey production in the United States, 2013–2017

Abstract

With increasing concern about the emergence and spread of resistant bacteria, there is an increasing motivation to optimize antimicrobial use administrations in animal agriculture. A key component of antimicrobial stewardship is the ability to collect antimicrobial use data and ultimately use this information to assess that administrations are necessary and effective. The objective of this study was to develop a system for collecting on‐farm antimicrobial use data from the US turkey industry and to have it be representative of the largest commercial turkey producers in the United States that comprise the vast majority of national turkey production. Participation was voluntary. Data were collected for the period 2013 through 2017 and are reported on a calendar year basis. Using statistics from USDA:NASS as a denominator, the data supplied by participating companies represented approximately 67.3% of turkey production in the United States in 2013 and increased to approximately 69.8% in 2017. The data that were submitted for 2017 are based on approximately 187,016,604 poults placed, 164,081,335 turkeys slaughtered, and 5,178,431,422 pounds liveweight produced. The estimated percentage of turkey poults placed that received hatchery antimicrobials decreased from 96% in 2013 to 41% in 2017. Medically important in‐feed antimicrobial use decreased substantially. For example, in‐feed tetracycline use decreased approximately 67% between 2013 and 2017. Medically important water‐soluble antimicrobial use decreased substantially for most antimicrobials. Between 2013 and 2017, water‐soluble penicillin use decreased approximately 42%, water‐soluble tetracycline use decreased approximately 28%, and water‐soluble lincomycin use decreased approximately 46%. Reducing the total amounts of antimicrobials used might be a crude indicator for mitigating the selection of antimicrobial resistance. Reducing the need for such use and verifying that treatment regimens deliver beneficial outcomes to animal health are more meaningful objectives.

Characterizing avian pathogenic Escherichia coli (APEC) from colibacillosis cases, 2018

“…In addition, these isolates were collected post implementation of the veterinary feed directive (VFD) (Food and Drug Administration, 2015) which may also have an influence on the results observed. Our speculations are further supported by a recent report by Singer & Porter (2019) and Singer et al (2020aSinger et al ( , 2020b who surveyed chicken and turkey producers nationally (2013-2017) and found significant reductions in the on-farm use of antimicrobials in feed and at the hatchery. Similarly, the overall low prevalence of plasmid replicons detected in our isolates further supports our observations on the phenotypical resistance prevalence.…”

Antimicrobial use in wean to market pigs in the United States assessed via voluntary sharing of proprietary data

“…The question as to which of the three comparisons might best indicate the relative likelihood of selection for AMR of human health relevance remains unanswerable. We observe analogous problems in broiler and turkey production in which generalizations about indications and weight at treatment confound interpretation of antimicrobial use data (Singer et al, 2020a, 2020b).…”

“…Another distinction of the study was that it focused solely on growing pig production, rather than the entire industry. This parallels the approaches adopted in the corresponding projects on beef cattle, broilers and turkeys (Hope et al, 2020; Singer et al, 2020a, 2020b). Variability in age susceptibility is a recognized characteristic of the epidemiology of most swine diseases, and infectious diseases are generally more problematic in younger animals than in adult breeding stock (Lekagul et al., 2019).…”

Comparison of different biomass methodologies to adjust sales data on veterinary antimicrobials in the USA

“…However, in reality, much of the antimicrobials sold for use in turkeys are administered to control diseases with high incidence rates 75–78 due to lack of approved efficacious drugs or use of antimicrobials with low potency (i.e. use of high molecular weight antimicrobials or use of higher grams administered per regimen), 75 , 76 , 78 , 79 thus inflating the volume of the sales. This demonstrates how using the antimicrobial sales data alone could be misleading in interpreting the actual antimicrobial use in a population and should be discouraged.…”

“…36 , 37 Importantly, sales data provide no information about the actual animals’ exposure to antimicrobials, such as in terms of diseases indication, age/weight of treatment, dose frequency or course duration. 87 , 88 The actual antimicrobial exposure for a disease depends on potency/molecular weight and doses, which vary by antimicrobial, 78 , 89 animal species, production categories 39 and administration route, 90 but the sales data do not reflect those differences. Thus, while the biomass-adjusted antimicrobial sales estimated by the four methodologies are valuable, they do not reflect the actual use of antimicrobials in animals, and, as such, antimicrobial stewardship cannot be inferred from the biomass-adjusted sales estimates.…”