Abstract
BackgroundRational use of drugs in veterinary medicine has numerous benefits, such as increasing efficacy, decreasing the potential adverse effects, reducing risk of drug residue and combating development of microorganism’s drug resistance.MethodsA retrospective study with the aim of evaluating the current rational use of veterinary drugs was conducted at college of veterinary medicine and agriculture veterinary teaching hospital and Ada district veterinary clinic, central Ethiopia. One thousand eight hundred and nineteen animal patients’ encounters were randomly selected for the study from prescription papers and prescription registration books retrospectively.ResultsThe average number of drugs prescribed per encounter was 1.23 with maximum of five. The percentage of encounters in which antimicrobials and anthelmintics was prescribed were 54.4 % (1216/2235) and 38.9 % (869/2235), respectively. The percentages of drugs prescribed by generic name and from essential veterinary drug list were 90.1 % (2014/2235) and 99.7 % (2229/2235), respectively. The most commonly prescribed antimicrobials and anthelmintics were oxytetracycline 1016 (45.5 %), penicillin and streptomycin combination 168 (7.5 %), sulfa drugs 23 (1.0 %), and albendazole 732 (32.8 %) and ivermectin 137 (6.1 %). Among the 1819 animal-patient encounters, only 57 % (n = 1037) of the prescriptions were written adequately, 43 % (n = 782) incorrectly prescribed and 1179 cases of the adequately specified prescription were tentatively diagnosed. For 656 (53.9 %) and 233 (26.8 %) inadequately specified cases antimicrobials and anthelmintics were prescribed, respectively. Antibiotics were prescribed irrationally for cases which were tentatively diagnosed as parasitic 21.6 % (n = 262) and viral to prevent secondary bacterial complications 6.0 % (n = 73). Among all patients that were admitted to veterinary clinics, 96.6 % (1757) were treated empirically without getting correct laboratory-supported diagnosis. Chi Square test for trend analysis showed a statistically significant association between irrational drug usage and year (p = 0.000).ConclusionsThe findings had shown problems in generic prescribing, incorrect diagnosis, and non-availability of standard veterinary treatment guideline and drug formulary in the study area. Therefore, veterinary drugs, specially, antimicrobial agents should be judiciously used; and a wide scale study to safeguard the public from drug residual effects and antimicrobial resistance development is recommended.
Highlights
Rational use of drugs in veterinary medicine has numerous benefits, such as increasing efficacy, decreasing the potential adverse effects, reducing risk of drug residue and combating development of microorganism’s drug resistance
Study area and period The study was conducted from November 2013 to June 2014 in CVMA-VTH and at Ada district veterinary clinic, Bishoftu, central Ethiopia, which is located at 45 km South East of Addis Ababa
The rational drug use evaluation has shown that antimicrobials, anthelmintics, antimicrobial with anthelmintic combinations, antimicrobial with other drugs combinations, and anthelmintic with other drugs combinations were prescribed (Table 1)
Summary
Rational use of drugs in veterinary medicine has numerous benefits, such as increasing efficacy, decreasing the potential adverse effects, reducing risk of drug residue and combating development of microorganism’s drug resistance. Most failures during antimicrobial therapy may occur when the pathogenic microorganism is unknown and combination of two or more drugs administered empirically. To avoid these mistakes, clinically confirmed, effective antimicrobial combinations should be used [2]. More than half of all medicines are prescribed, dispensed or sold improperly, and 50 % of human patients fail to take them correctly. This is more wasteful, expensive and dangerous, both to the health of the individual patient and to the population as a whole that magnifies the problem of misuse of antimicrobial agents [3]
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