The British Poultry Council (BPC) run an antibiotic stewardship scheme that covers 90% of the meat poultry (chicken, turkey and duck) industries. As part of this scheme, antibiotic usage is collated on an annual basis and aggregate data published in the BPC annual report and the UK Veterinary Antimicrobial Resistance, Sales and Surveillance (VARSS) report.

Animal subcategories: No subcategories in the three animal species are distinguished.

Input: Producers have been asked to submit quarterly (chickens) or annual (turkeys and duck) AMU data in the form of an aggregate spreadsheet. This may be from farm records, but in some cases the data comes from the vet. BPC then collate the data.

The data is presented as the overall annual amount of antibiotic active ingredient used (in tonnes), which includes breeders and producers. For the producers, this is then compared with the population at risk of treatment to create a mg/kg usage figure.
BPC calculates the population at risk of treatment by using annual slaughter numbers. The EMA PCU guidelines[1] are followed for broilers (1 kg per slaughtered broiler) and turkeys (6.5 kg per slaughter turkey). For ducks, where there are no ESVAC weights assigned, a weight of 1.75 kg has been used.

No farm-level benchmarking is carried out as part of this scheme.