Hot antibiotics, cold calculations

Concerns for antimicrobial resistance evolve like fashion:  it gets hip, fades out, then gets hip again.  These days antibiotics hit the news again after the consumers organisation announced that almost all chicken in the supermarket is infected with ESBL (an enyzme that makes bacteria resistant to most antibiotics). As the news travels, everybody at work is talking about antibiotics: not only my colleagues who have been busy monitoring veterinary antibiotic use in livestock sectors for years , but also colleagues who had never thought about antibiotics as something interesting are considering research on antibiotics. 

I am concerned and excited at the same time.  A year ago,  when the ’antibiotic alarm’ was sounded in the media, I had the idea of conducting research on the economics of anti-antibiotics to analyse the economic aspects of reducing antibiotic use in livestock production. It seemed to me that many arguments for restricting antibiotic use in livestock production were not well grounded and the pros and cons are far from being well understood.  Most people are not aware of the fact that the presence of resistant bacteria poses merely a hazard to human health and not per se a high risk. Antibiotic resistance is primarily a microbiological phenomenon which may or may not have clinical implications for human beings. Also less known is that veterinary antibiotic use is merely one of many sources that contribute to the increase of antimicrobial resistance.

From the perspective of managing antibiotic sensitivity as a ’man-made’  non-renewable natural resource and treating resistance as an externality not properly priced in the market, I believe that economic analysis has a great potential to generate feasible and efficient solutions to the antibiotic issue. Unfortunately, my research proposal was considered too general at that time. That was reasonable because I had done but a little empirical work back then. In the months there after, I have been looking at our monitoring data on antibiotic use in combination with our farm accountancy data and busy writing up the findings. Much can be said about the claim that antibiotics are overused or misused in livestock production, but it is clear that economic analysis is far from being well-developed in this field. Perhaps the time is finally ripe to go deeper into the dust cloud of the media hype to look at the forces that are fundamentally at work.  (to be continued)