Standard Veterinary Treatment Guidelines for the major livestock and poultry diseases

The Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying (DAHD), under the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry, and Dairying, Government of India, has released the Standard Veterinary Treatment Guidelines (SVTGs) for livestock and poultry in India.

The SVTGs will empower veterinarians and animal health professionals to deliver standardized, rational treatment, ensuring improved animal health across. 

Key features of the Guidelines

• The SVTG is developed by a group of about 80 Expert Veterinarians/Clinicians having enormous field experience.
• Standard treatment guidelines have been synthesized for almost all diseases of livestock and poultry common in the country.
• Important clinical diagnostic criteria including differential diagnosis – for all the selected diseases listed in SVTG – are given.
• Drugs/medicine along with dose, route, and duration of treatment, Withdrawal period and potential adverse reactions for a particular drug
  are written clearly and concisely.
• Decision on the first choice of treatment of a disease depends on the diagnosis of the disease and disease condition in the affected animals.
• Same standard line of treatment will be available for use by all animal healthcare providers which will lead to homogeneity in animal  healthcare service delivery.
• The SVTG is also published as digital small, durable pocket size manual – as Ready Reckoner which makes it convenient to be accessed through mobile phones.
• The SVTG Document should ideally be conjointly with other documents with standard case definitions of animal diseases.
• The SVTG is a dynamic “Live” document and will be updated frequently based on the field experience and globally evolving scenarios and
  developments in veterinary treatment domain.

Benefits to stakeholders

Every Stakeholder in animal health chain is a beneficiary of the standard veterinary treatment guidelines. The benefits to category-wise stakeholders are as under:

• Animal patients: The livestock and poultry get effective treatment on regular basis, consistency in prescription, treatment with decreased
  ambiguity, and better compliance.
• Animal Owners: The animal owners get quality treatment with standard set of medicine prescriptions, treatment is less-expensive, rational use of medicines makes food safer fetching good price, SVTGs build the confidence and motivates the animal owners for permitting treatment and vaccination of their livestock and poultry.
• Animal Health Providers: SVTGs enable correct diagnosis based on pathognomonic symptoms and lesions, decide standard set of treatment which could be the best in that situation, rationalize the treatment leading to a standard set of treatment as and when necessary, in the similar situation.
• Medicine Supply Chain Stakeholders: Advantages to medicine supply chain stakeholders include: quality of medicines assessed in field situation, predicted risk or no risk of routinely used medicines as per SVTG, predicted requirement of medicines in that area (local, state, or national level) in short- and long-term, assessment of use of medicines in an area may help in calculation of usage of the drugs/antimicrobials, and forewarning a disease situation, etc.
• Livestock and Poultry Health Policymakers: SVTG provides basis and methods for livestock and poultry disease control, assessment of quality of medicines and hence quality of animal health services, making budgetary provisions for regular supply of medicines in a particular area based on past supply and use, homogeneity in treatment helps in integrating the procurement supplies as well as integrating the facilities.

Scope of information 

The Standard Veterinary Treatment Guidelines (SVTG) for livestock and poultry is a document comprising of a chapter on each disease with different
sub-heads, viz., Definition and Causative agent, Transmission, Clinical signs, Lesions, Diagnosis (including differential diagnosis), Treatment and
Control, and Biosecurity Measures.

All the diseases of livestock and poultry in various subheads like non-infectious/systemic/metabolic diseases of ruminants (large and small), infectious diseases of large ruminants; infectious diseases of small ruminants; and standalone chapters each on infectious/systemic/metabolic diseases of pig, poultry, yak, mithun, camel, and equine (horses, donkeys, and mules). 

The Standard Veterinary Treatment Guidelines (SVTG) for livestock and poultry