Antimicrobial resistance in the risk society – a Danish study on how veterinarians and human medical doctors construct risk through blaming

Abstract

This article deals with risk and antimicrobial resistance (AMR). AMR is considered to be one of the major global public health threats in the twenty-first century. This article applies the ideas of Ulrich Beck and Mary Douglas about the relation between risk and blame to competing discourses about AMR. AMR is closely connected to the use of antimicrobials in livestock production and for preventing/treating human infection. Using qualitative interviews with professionals from the human medical sector and the agricultural sector in Denmark, the article shows how representatives from the two sectors frame and construct AMR risks by blaming each other. Our study shows how experts within the human medical and veterinarian fields construct their own risk assessments in relation to AMR by making claims that shift blame to the other sector. They create a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and a kind of ‘otherness’ that is used to identify risky behaviour and the overuse of antimicrobials.

Keywords:

• AMR
• framing
• medicine
• risk
• veterinarians

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank editor Patrick Brown and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.