ORAL PRESENTATIONS ORAL PRESENTATIONS VetStat – The Danish nation-wide monitoring of veterinary medicine use on herd level

The Danish monitoring programme, VetStat, collects detailed data on all veterinary usage of therapeutic drugs and coccidiostats on herd level. The detailed information enables standardization of drug usage and allows comparison between individual herds. The vision is to prevent misuse and optimize the usage of antimicrobial drugs. This is achieved by providing information to farmers, veterinary practitioners, and control authorities about usage patterns and linking with bacterial antimicrobial susceptibility data at farm level, and by aiding the development of prudent guidelines. Data will be used in research and in risk assessment to aid the development of risk based control strategies in the food chain, reducing the spread of resistant bacterial infections from animals to humans. The presentation gives a description of the design of the system, the validation of the data, and the prospects for using the information to protect animal and public health.