In August 2020, Ray Chan and Henry Buller presented their paper on ‘Diagnostic practices and Drivers of the Use of Rapid Diagnostics to Reduce Antimicrobial Use in Animal Farming in the UK’ Chan, K. W. and Buller. H. et al. (2020) at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science, which was held online instead of, as originally intended, in Prague due to the COVID-19 pandemic
Abstract
This paper explores the current role and place of diagnostic tests in the treatment of farm animal disease. With the growing focus on reduced reliance on antibiotic medicines in both animal and human patient care, attention is increasingly being focused on the practice, the technology and the function of diagnostic tests and how these can support responsible antimicrobial use. Emerging diagnostic technologies offer the possibility of more rapid testing for bacterial disease, while food chain actors and others are increasingly seeking to make diagnostic tests mandatory before the use of critically important antibiotics. This paper reports the findings of a recent large-scale on-line survey of UK farm animal veterinary surgeons (N=135) which investigated current veterinary diagnostic practice with particular attention to the relationship between diagnostic test use and antibiotic treatment. Results revealed a range of factors that influence veterinary diagnostic practice and demonstrate the continuing importance of clinical observation and animal/herd knowledge in the selection of antibiotic treatment. The findings identify a considerable ambivalence on the part of farm animal veterinarians regarding the current and future uses of rapid and point-of-care diagnostic tests as a means of improving clinical diagnosis and addressing inappropriate antibiotic medicine use.
Also, at the same online 4S/EASST conference, Henry Buller presented a second paper, drawing upon the DIAL and other AMR research, entitled ‘Structures, Practices, Understandings: Confronting agricultural Antimicrobial use practices in three settings’
Abstract
Drawing on a number of different research projects currently being undertaken or recently completed, this paper confronts and contrasts antimicrobial use practices in livestock systems across three very different national and sub-national situations. While the rhetoric of a global AMR crisis is assembled and enacted at the international level, local farming systems in all three countries display levels of contextual variation that undermine the coherence of those emergent discourses that evoke a singular and unified ‘health’ and the possibility of access to it. National AMR strategies might embrace broad and largely generic reduction targets for antimicrobial use, and some may reach these through the harvesting of low, yet fulsome fruit. But beyond these easier, and often broadly comparable, targets, the significance of embedded practices and technologies, institutional and professional structures and collective understandings becomes a lot more telling. This paper looks at how transnational lines of force and influence (whether in the form of globally trading food companies, international agreements or cooperative research programmes) map across localised domestic economies and the often highly variable social meanings and practices associated with animal health.
