Study on the Availability and Rational Use of Veterinary Drugs in Veterinary Clinics of Haramaya and Dire Dawa Districts, Eastern Ethiopia.
Animal healthcare necessitates the availability of safe, effective, and affordable drugs of the required quality in adequate amounts at all times. Access to affordable, quality-assured essential medicines is crucial to reducing the financial burden of care, preventing greater pain and suffering, including shortening the duration of illness, and averting needless disability and death worldwide. Drug access combines three factors: availability, affordability, and rational use.
Additionally, around 50% of patients fail to take their medicines correctly. Problems like lack of information, poor communication between animal health professionals and animal owners, lack of diagnostic facilities, demand from the owners, and high burden of diseases with overlapping clinical symptoms lead to the irrational use of drugs.
Irrational prescription of drugs is a common occurrence in clinical practice. Important reasons for irrational drug prescription are lack of knowledge about drugs, unethical drug promotions, and irrational prescribing habits of clinicians. This is because several diseases can have similar clinical signs, especially infectious and febrile diseases.
The irrational use of drugs is a major problem still in clinical practice as it could result in toxicity and treatment failure in patients and in the emergence of drug-resistant pathogens.12 Resistance may escalate to the point at which the efficacy of drugs will no more be predictable and infections once treatable could become untreatable.
In addition, the most common problems for the increase of antibiotic resistance in the Ethiopian situatiare on, poor dispensing, drug quality concerns, especially in rural areas, unregistered drugs and drug sellers in rural areas, low patient knowledge about drugs dispensed to, them, and weak monitoring and lack of antibiotic policy and evaluations.
Vet Med Open J. 2022; 7(2): 46-61. doi: 10.17140/VMOJ-7-168
