Veterinarian \u2018responsibility\u2019: conflicts of definition and appropriation surrounding the public problem of antimicrobial resistance in France

Nicolas Fortané

doi:10.1057/s41599-019-0273-2

Abstract

Over the past decade, veterinarians have been accused of being largely responsible for the overuse of antibiotics in livestock farming. Building on Gusfield’s theoretical perspective, I analyse how AMR can be conceived as a public problem and show how the French veterinary profession has been able to reframe it in such a way that veterinarians are no longer perceived as a threat but instead as protectors of public health. Based on interviews with political stakeholders and veterinary practitioners, as well as on a survey of the veterinary press, this article interprets the controversies that structure the AMR problem as conflicts of definition and appropriation with regard to the legitimate uses of antibiotics. Veterinarians have had to make significant compromises in order to reframe their responsibility and not lose control over the prescription and sale of antibiotics. This dynamic is the result of a three-stage process: firstly, veterinarian responsibility was conceived as a form of ownership where their authority to define the legitimate use of antibiotics was not contested; secondly, it was deemed to be a form of guilt whereby they were dispossessed of their legitimacy and capacity to act; thirdly, it was framed as a form of accountability where they were able to demonstrate their role as public health guardians. During this most recent stage - which corresponds to the present framework of the AMR problem - veterinarians have had to accept that the control and definition of legitimate uses of antibiotics needs to be distributed among a wider range of actors than was the case in the past.

Highlights

The problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is interesting because it is highly fragmented between actors competing for its ownership, making it relatively plastic and subject to many controversies with regard to its modalities of regulation (Bud, 2007; Podolsky, 2015, 2018)
Ever since antibiotics began to be widely used in agriculture in the late 1940s, the problem of AMR in livestock farming has been the subject of several episodes of publicity, the different framings of which have led to a wide range of management methods and measures of control, depending on the historical and geographical contexts (Finlay and Marcus, 2016; Begemann et al, 2018; Kirchhelle, 2018)
One of the main questions that we will have to answer in the coming years is whether or not the current decline in antibiotic use in livestock farming is a sustainable trend

Summary

Introduction

The problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is interesting because it is highly fragmented between actors competing for its ownership, making it relatively plastic and subject to many controversies with regard to its modalities of regulation (Bud, 2007; Podolsky, 2015, 2018). One specific facet of this problem is affected by these conflicts of definition and appropriation: the agricultural sector. Ever since antibiotics began to be widely used in agriculture in the late 1940s, the problem of AMR in livestock farming has been the subject of several episodes of publicity, the different framings of which have led to a wide range of management methods and measures of control, depending on the historical and geographical contexts (Finlay and Marcus, 2016; Begemann et al, 2018; Kirchhelle, 2018). There have been controversies about the status of colistin, an antibiotic that is commonly used in agriculture in LMICs but that human medicine would like to classify as a last-resort antibiotic and reserved for use by doctors

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Conclusion