Ceva has joined forces with Sanders, one of the leaders in animal feed, to develop Indic@Vet, a new tool to monitor use of antibiotics in farm animals and to evaluate actions taken to reduce the use of these products.
This approach is fully in line with Ceva’s commitment to rational use of antibiotics –‘as little as possible, only as much as necessary’as Ceva’s adage puts it. In its rst year of use, the tool has been shown to be effective in helping farmers reduce usage of antibiotics.
Reduced usage of antibiotics is considered to be essential to safeguard the efficacy of antibiotics for people and animals and to overcome the growing problem of antibiotic resistance.
Indic@Vet (pronounced Indicavet) is an online platform available to farmers and vets. It combines the use of production data with prescription data to calculate optimal antibiotic usage using standardized approaches developed by the European Medicines Agency.
In September 2016, after nine months of this new tool being used, antibiotic use on farms using Indic@Vet decreased by 23% in poultry and 49% in swine. For swine, the consumption of colistin, an antibiotic used for gastrointestinal infections, decreased by 42%.
As for uoroquinolones, now classified as antibiotics of “critical priority” to human health by WHO, they are no longer used.
To enable this reduction in the use of antibiotics, it is necessary to have a healthy animal raised under the best possible conditions. To achieve this requires attention in ve complementary areas: secure rearing management, a balanced diet, biosecurity to ensure a cleaner production environment, rational medication and effective alternatives to antibiotics.
Sustainable Sanitary Management is a global approach common to all Sanders’ animal production. It aims to reduce the use of antibiotics by controlling the fundamentals of livestock farming by following five axes: secure breeding management, a balanced diet, well-controlled biosecurity, rational medication and the use of alternatives to antibiotics. The Indic@vet project and the collaboration with Ceva were born around the 4th axis on rational use. The objective is to monitor the consumption of antibiotics in livestock farms – because we can only improve what we measure precisely. Indic@vet is an educational tool that allows dialogue between livestock keepers and their veterinarians and measurement of the benefits of the actions implemented around the other axes. The most committed producers can serve as an example for others
Stéphane Athimon
Director of the animal sectors of the Avril-Sanders group
