Stewardship of veterinary medicines on dairy farms

On 4 November 1922, after a systematic search, Howard Carter and the Fifth Earl of Carnarvon finally discovered the actual tomb of Tutankhamun, hidden deep in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. There is a joke that discovering a farmer’s medicine cupboard can be a similar experience. Every farm has one; the real medicine cupboard, not just the sanitised one on show for the farm assurance inspector. But they might not be easy to find, and they might contain all sorts of surprises. Gwen Rees and colleagues1 documented the findings from a cross-sectional study of the storage of veterinary medicines on 27 UK dairy farms. The paper is summarised on page 153 of this issue of Vet Record . For those of us that know dairy farms well, their findings would probably not be surprising. Yet we should still allow ourselves to be shocked. The study effectively holds a mirror up to our profession to show some of the common malpractices which we sanction as the prescribers of the majority of these medicines. #### What you need to know Some examples of such malpractice included …