Who’s Hogging Our Antibiotics?

On February 9 and 10, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric aired a two-part series on the use of antibiotics in food animal production.

On many industrial farms, food animals are fed low doses of antibiotics over long periods of time in order to speed up growth and compensate for crowded and unsanitary living conditions. In fact, up to 70 percent of antibiotics in the U.S. go to healthy food animals.

The routine use of antibiotics in industrial farming contributes to an increase in dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can spread to humans. As a result of this practice, the antibiotics we depend on to keep us healthy are at risk of becoming less effective.

Consumers are exposed to antibiotic-resistant bacteria though many ways, including the consumption and handling of inadequately cooked meat, drinking surface or ground water and eating crops that have been contaminated by manure or even breathing air that is vented from concentrated animal housing or released during animal transport.

Congress has a solution to phase out the overuse of antibiotics. Introduced in spring 2009, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act would withdraw the use of seven classes of antibiotics vitally important to human health from use on industrial farms unless animals or herds are sick with disease or unless drug companies can prove that their routine use does not harm human health.

Why would you give healthy food animals antibiotics? What steps are being taken to limit the routine use of antibiotics in food animal production? What will happen as bacteria become increasingly resistant to antibiotics?