Differences in calculating farm-related antibiotic use in various monitoring systems in Germany - an overview

摘要

In Germany antibiotic usage in farm animals is constantly captured by various systems: The documentation in the HI-Tier-database, which is mandatory by the German drug law and the documentation within privately organized quality-assurance systems like the system of the "QS Qualitat und Sicherheit GmbH" Additional data are provided by research projects, such as VetCAb ("Veterinary Consumption of Antibiotics"). These monitoring systems make their calculation of antibiotic usage based on the treatment frequency or equivalent metrics. Since these metrics have varying definitions within the systems and a detailed description is often missing, there is confusion about the interpretation of results from different sources.