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Treatment recording in veal calves: a benefit for bovine respiratory disease management B. Pardon Department of Large Animal Internal Medicine, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Ghent University, Salisburylaan 133, 9820 Merelbeke Veterinarians are often confronted with endemic respiratory disease in both dairy, beef as veal calves. Especially recurrent cases and the occurrence of treatment failures are hard to manage. Farmers tend to contact the veterinarian only after several antimicrobial treatments have been tried out and hardly any registration of antimicrobial use is done. Only recently in the Netherlands, and based on the high prevalence of antimicrobial resistance in bacteria from different body sites in different farm animal species, registration of individual antimicrobial treatment became (provisionally) obligatory in the veal industry. The objective of the present study was to describe the present antimicrobial drug use (quantitative and qualitative) for respiratory disease in Belgian veal calves. Preliminary results on 6 herds are available. Veal calves are predominantly treated with oral antimicrobials (22% of the production time (12-40%)). Of the calves, 24% (406/1740 calves at risk) was also individually treated and 15% (9.6-31.0) was individually treated for BRD. BRD accounted for 65% of the used antimicrobial dosages. Of the calves individually treated for BRD, on average 17.5% (3.3-47.1%) and 3.7% (0-10.34) required a second or third treatment respectively. As reasons for this therapy failure, underlying persistent infections (bovine viral diarrhea virus and Mycoplasma bovis), a wrong diagnosis (increased respiratory rate caused by other diseases: congenital heart defects, perforating abomasal ulcerations or polyserositis) and unsuccessful antimicrobial treatment could be identified. An unsuccessful antimicrobial treatment can be the consequence of resistant bacteria (natural and acquired antimicrobial resistance), but can even more important be the consequence of an inadequate treatment length or a to late initial treatment. Compared to the average number of treatment days per treated calf (on average 6 days), the average treatment length (consecutive days) was smaller (4 days). On average 27% (12-50) of the drug doses, were given to only three calves (top 3 antimicrobial consumers). Even so, 16.4% (0.7-43) of the doses were given to calves, which eventually died. The present information shows that keeping treatment records can enlighten the blind side of BRD and can provide both farmer as veterinarian with essential information towards evaluation of present and installment of future protocols. As automated treatment recording systems will become available, this information should more easily become available for the veterinarian in the future.