Salmon farming companies in Scotland have dramatically reduced antibiotic medicine use by more than half in the space of a year, according to a new UK government report.
In Scotland, medicines are used when qualified vets deem it necessary to treat specific bacterial infections and when there is clear evidence that treatment will improve the health of fish, with antibiotics only used under licence by the Scottish environmental regulator, SEPA.
The Veterinary Medicines Directorate’s Veterinary Antimicrobial Resistance and Sales Surveillance (VARSS) report showed the 2022 usage of antibiotics in salmon was 18.6 mg/kg, down 24.5 mg/kg since 2021.
By comparison, the level for pig farming was 71.8 mg/kg and 35.4 mg/kg in turkeys, while the sheep and cattle sectors do not publish full data.
Last year, fewer than one in 10 seawater farms used antibiotics – meaning the overwhelming majority of salmon farms did not treat with antibiotics at all. The small number of farms that did so used less than half the amount of the previous year, indicating that the environmental challenges which could be managed through antibiotics had dissipated in 2022.
The amount of antibiotics used last year was only slightly more than when this information was first recorded in 2017.
Trade body Salmon Scotland also highlighted that the salmon sector does not use any antibiotics that have been identified as high priority for human health and there is no trace of antibiotics making its way into the food chain.
“Like any medicine, antibiotics are used responsibly, sparingly and only when required in the health and welfare interests of our fish, and only under prescription from licensed veterinarians,” Salmon Scotland’s head of technical Dr Iain Berrill said. “The requirement to protect our fish from environmental challenges meant a significantly lower level of antibiotics were used in the past 12 months on a very small number of farms.”
In 2017, 3,053kg of antibiotics was used by the Scottish salmon sector. In 2021, this increased to 8,850kg due to the challenge of keeping larger fish in the sea for longer and has now dropped to 3,141kg (-64.5% since 2021).
