The FDA Just Released Scary New Data on Antibiotics And Farms

(I'm not sure if this belongs in a different place - please let me know if it does.)

The FDA Just Released Scary New Data on Antibiotics And Farms - Mother Jones

Back in April 2012, the Food and Drug Administration launched an effort to address a problem that had been festering for decades: the meat industry's habit of feeding livestock daily low does of antibiotics, which keeps animals alive under stressful conditions and may help them grow faster, but also generates bacterial pathogens that can shake off antibiotics, and make people sick.

The FDA approached the task gingerly: It asked the industry to voluntarily wean itself from routine use of "medically important" antibiotics—those that are critical to human medicine, like tetracycline. In addition to the light touch, the agency plan included a massive loophole: that while livestock producers could no longer use antibiotics as a growth promoter, they could use them to "prevent" disease—which often means using them in the same way (routinely) at the same rate. How's it working? Last week, the FDA delivered an early look, releasing data for 2013, the year after it rolled out its plan. The results are … scary.

[img][/img]

Note that use of medically important antibiotics actually grew 3 percent in 2013 compared to the previous year, while the industry's reliance on non-medically import drugs, which it's supposed to be shifting to, fell 2 percent. A longer view reveals an even mo4e worisome trend: between 2009 and 2013, use of medically important drugs on farm grew 20 percent. According to Natural Resources Defense Council's Avinash Kar, 70 percent of medically important antibiotics sold in the US go to farms. And the USDA date show that these livestock operations are particularly voracious for the same antibiotics doctors prescribe to people. Farms burn through 9.1 million kilograms of medically important antibiotics vs. 5.5 million kilograms of ones not currently used in human medicine. That means about 62 percent of their total antibiotic use could be be helping generate pathogens that resist the drugs we rely on.

Read more: http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2015/04/meat-industrys-antibiotic-habit-still-voracious