"Stumpage" fees for animal antibiotics

Aidan Hollis and Ziana Ahmed have published a short and terrific letter in NEJM outlining the benefits of a user fee for agricultural uses of antibiotics (h/t HuffPost). Key points:.

1. More than 13M kg of antibiotics are sold for ag use in the US each year, at a cost of less than $25/kg.
2. A ban on the use of antibiotics as growth promoters would raise prices some $2B per year.
3. The medical value of antibiotics is more than $60T in the US; thus even a 1% loss of susceptibility due to ag use is a big economic loss, much larger than the economic benefits of ag use.
4. They liken antibiotic susceptibility to a commons, and propose a user fee that would be akin to stumpage fees paid by loggers.

There's more - but go read it for yourself.

 

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