In what should be the first of many such moves, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will bar poultry farmers from using a type of antibiotic that’s also important in human medicine. The problem is part of a larger public health issue concerning the too-frequent use of antibiotics in hospitals and doctor’s offices as well as in agriculture.
If animals are sick or are exposed to disease they should be treated.
But seven classes of antibiotics used in humans are also fed to farm animals at low, non-therapeutic doses. The Union of Concerned Scientists says 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States (about 25 million pounds annually) are routinely fed to swine, poultry and beef cattle not to treat illnesses but to promote weight gain. Because the animals are fed low doses of the drugs, bacteria are growing resistant to them, raising the specter of disease-causing microbes for which there’s no cure.
The FDA’s decision dealt with a class of antibiotics, but just one is fed to poultry: Baytril, made by Bayer Corp. The drug is identical to Cipro, an antibiotic used in humans to treat food poisoning and even anthrax. The bacteria that cause food poisoning in humans had almost no resistance to Cipro when the drug was approved for use in agriculture in 1995. Since then, about 21 percent of the bacteria in human food poisoning cases have developed resistance to Cipro, says the Centers for Disease Control.
The problem isn’t just that the poultry could carry drug-resistant bacteria to consumers’ tables. It’s that super strains of bacteria can infest the water and soils around farms, potentially spreading diseases to farm workers and from there to the general population.
In April, medical and environmental groups asked the FDA to ban the non-therapeutic, agricultural use of all seven types of antibiotics that are used in both humans and livestock. Meanwhile, legislation to mandate the ban was introduced in Congress. The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act would still allow medicinal use of the drugs. In the Senate, S. 742 is sponsored by moderate Republican Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine and Democrat Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, while in the House, H.R. 2562 is sponsored by Rep. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat. Colorado’s congressional members should join as co-sponsors.
Some 385 organizations support the ban, including the American Medical Association, American Public Health Association, American Nurses Association and Colorado Nurses Association. Their fear is justified: The overuse of antibiotics could rob our medical arsenal of one of its most effective disease-fighting tools.
