27 August 2024

BBC News: When vets are scarce what can farmers do?

[Originally published on BBC News online]

Quang Doan Hong is a busy person. The accountant, who lives with his family in Hưng Yên, Vietnam, also owns a farm with about 600 pigs.

He’s had to learn quickly about pig health, from which vaccines are effective to when to use antibiotics.

“When the weather changes, I give the pigs antibiotics,” Mr Hong says. In his experience, rapid changes between sunny and rainy weather make it necessary to administer antibiotics for respiratory and diarrhoeal diseases.

Mr Hong has also had to learn which sources of information are reliable. He’s joined farming groups and done online research, although he’s realised that some information on Facebook, for instance, isn’t reliable. “I need to filter it,” he explains.

As his operation has grown, Mr Hong has become reluctant to have veterinarians visit.

He worries about the risk of disease transmission from people who come into contact with animals at many different sites. Some large farms require animal health workers to quarantine for several days before visiting.

One thing that would be useful to Mr Hong is a hybrid source of information: something that combines the expertise of veterinarians with the convenience of digital access.

These kinds of remote veterinary technologies are under development.

The team behind Farm2Vet, a veterinary app for farmers, recently won the top prize from the Trinity Challenge, a charity tackling global health threats.

The competition that Farm2Vet won focused on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) – the urgent global threat of our limited slate of antibiotic medicines becoming less effective as pathogens adapt.

Farms where antibiotics are overused can become breeding grounds for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. These bacteria then enter the food system and the environment, for instance due to animal waste. Some drug-resistant bacteria, like certain strains of E. coli, can spread between animals and humans.

“Antibiotic misuse and overuse largely relates to a lack of understanding, a lack of support,” says Marc Mendelson, the director of the Trinity Challenge, who also heads the infectious diseases division at the University of Cape Town’s hospital.

Veterinary antibiotics can be extremely cheap, Prof Mendelson says. “Some farmers probably don’t even know that they’re giving antibiotics, because it’s just in the feed.”

Read full article here.