**Author details**

*Livestock Health and Farming*

surgical prophylaxis [45].

**5.4 Prescription of antimicrobials**

**5.3 Recommendations to control antibiotic overuse**

livestock safety. Creating an antimicrobial stewardship program needs baseline information, including institutional use of antimicrobial [43]. This would help to identify recurrent problems with antimicrobial use at the institution and frames the problems that need to be addressed [44]. The antimicrobial stewardship efforts should focus on improving adherence to documentation standards, optimizing the use of antimicrobials, appropriateness of drug dosing, halting treatment of asymptomatic bacteria and microbes, and minimizing the length of

Recognizing that antibiotic resistance is a reality crossing the geographical boundaries of the world, in developing countries, the prevalence of resistant microbes will rise over time, which demands urgent action. Vaccinations to prevent various disease falls into this category of recommendation, but their "antibioticsparing" effects are often overlooked because these are of secondary importance. Restricting the use of antimicrobials in livestock and poultry for non-therapeutic use, particularly growth promotion, could be beneficial. There is a need to eliminate irrational or inappropriate use, enforce prescription only laws, and eliminate overthe-counter antibiotic purchases, surveillance, distribution of Standard Treatment Guidelines (STGs), antibiotic sensitivity testing, checklists for surgical procedures, educating farmers and other stakeholders about appropriate use of antibiotics, and improving antibiotic supply chain and quality (Global Antibiotic Resistance Partnership (GARP)-India Working Group 2011). For gaining better understanding and subsequent action toward antimicrobial resistance, detailed social science research is needed to gather information on the processes of diagnosis, prescription, use of antimicrobials, the application of treatments besides antimicrobials, and the processes of data generation. Thus, sub-optimal use, potential users, and food chain pinch points could be identified. There is a general scantiness of data on on-farm application and use of antimicrobials. The tools for recording on-farm medicine use, such as paper spread sheets and computerized entries, may be of practical use to farmers in the health management of their animals/birds or to veterinarians in providing an accurate picture of how prescribed medicines are actually used [46].

Prescription of antibiotics are strongly influenced by the demand of farmers for antibiotics, fear of veterinarians blamed if antimicrobials later prove unnecessary, the expectation of farmers to be prescribed antimicrobials, confidence of veterinarians in diagnosis. Thus, prescription decisions are strongly influenced by multifactorial non-clinical influences such as farmer pressure and cost of drug, etc., to some extent [47]. Also, variations are present in beliefs of veterinarians regarding efficacy of systemic antibiotics for dry-cow therapy results in very different decisions being taken on farm and considerable discrepancies in treatment. Thus, it raises concern of the consistency and appropriateness of antibiotic prescription by them [48]. Antibiotic sensitivity testing should be preferred before prescribing the antibiotics [49].

The overuse of antimicrobials in livestock is leading to decline in antimicrobial effectiveness against infections in animals and eventually in humans. Use of antimicrobials purely as growth promoters and prophylactic purposes should be

**18**

**6. Conclusion**

Hans Ram Meena\* and Vikash Kumar Division of Dairy Extension, ICAR-National Dairy Research Institute, Karnal, India

\*Address all correspondence to: drhrms@gmail.com

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
