A Retrospective, Observational Study on Antimicrobial Drug Use in Beef Fattening Operations in Northwestern Italy and Evaluation of Risk Factors Associated with Increased Antimicrobial Usage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The abuse or misuse of antimicrobials in animal production is thought to be a potential factor in the development of antimicrobial resistance in veterinary and human medicine. With this study, we wanted to quantify antimicrobial usage in beef fattening operations in northwestern Italy and to identify factors potentially influencing antimicrobial usage. The sample was composed of 26 beef fattening operations that import heifers and bulls from France. Data were extracted from the 2014 and 2015 treatment registers kept by the farmers. The mean (±SD) number of animal daily doses per animal (nADDa) per year for each farm was 3 (±2.1) during the study period (2014–2015). Group antimicrobial treatments (57.5% of all treatments) were often administered orally (70.5%) and consisted overwhelmingly of doxycycline (97%). Individual treatments (42.5% of all treatments) were administered parenterally (98.1%) and the most often used active substances were florfenicol (19.9%), marbofloxacin (19.5%), and tylosin (12.4%). There was a negative correlation between the nADDa for total and group treatments and average batch weight at arrival and between the amount of straw added per animal per day and the nADDa (p ≤ 0.05). Our data show that antimicrobials critical for human medicine were often used in beef fattening operations in northwestern Italy before the European guidelines for the prudent use of antimicrobials in veterinary medicine were issued. Additionally, the use of antimicrobials as a preventive group treatment was still widespread, mostly in lighter weight animals.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".