I worked on the topic of AMR and animal agriculture for a few years at an ESG org, and my impression is that animal agriculture plays a fairly small role in human AMR, maybe 1-10%. The evidence is pretty unclear, but when I pinned down experts their best guess was that it was a low factor, both based on the understanding of how AMR spreads from animals to humans, and also empirically (variance in human AMR based on variance in how many antibotics are given to farmed animals in that area).
My sense is tha a lot of animal advocacy organisations play up the role of factory farming in causing AMR to try and get other stakeholders to care. The argument goes that animals can be in much worse conditions if they are given antibiotics routinely, and so if we ban antibiotics the animals need more space and other better conditions. Unfortunately, I think this is both disingenuous (although I think many of the people promoting the topic don’t realise this), and I’ve heard from some animal advocates that when the routine use of antibiotics are banned in one region, conditions didn’t get better, mortality rates just went up.
I would appreciate if anyone with expertise on this topic would weigh in as I expect some of this to be wrong.
I worked on the topic of AMR and animal agriculture for a few years at an ESG org, and my impression is that animal agriculture plays a fairly small role in human AMR, maybe 1-10%. The evidence is pretty unclear, but when I pinned down experts their best guess was that it was a low factor, both based on the understanding of how AMR spreads from animals to humans, and also empirically (variance in human AMR based on variance in how many antibotics are given to farmed animals in that area).
My sense is tha a lot of animal advocacy organisations play up the role of factory farming in causing AMR to try and get other stakeholders to care. The argument goes that animals can be in much worse conditions if they are given antibiotics routinely, and so if we ban antibiotics the animals need more space and other better conditions. Unfortunately, I think this is both disingenuous (although I think many of the people promoting the topic don’t realise this), and I’ve heard from some animal advocates that when the routine use of antibiotics are banned in one region, conditions didn’t get better, mortality rates just went up.
I would appreciate if anyone with expertise on this topic would weigh in as I expect some of this to be wrong.