Antibiotic resistance is rapidly becoming a major health crisis in the United States, as a result of overuse of antibiotics in both human medicine and livestock production. However, according to analysis of U.S. Food & Drug Administration data by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used on animals. Farmers regularly administer low-dosages of antibiotics to accelerate growth or to prevent animals from getting sick due to unsanitary and crowded living conditions in factory farms.  However because antibiotics are so widely present on the farm, eventually most of the bugs that are vulnerable to the antibiotics are killed off, and only a very small handful of superbugs, ones that happen to be immune to the antibiotics, remain. The superbugs then flourish and spread. The problem of antibiotics resistance cannot be overcome without addressing the huge quantities of antibiotics used on livestock. The superbugs that are immune to antibiotics on the farm exchange genetic material with bacteria everywhere, leading to antibiotic resistance in hospitals and communities. Public health and environmental groups have sued FDA for its failure to act on antibiotics and the FDA has asked drug companies to voluntarily limit the use of certain antibiotics in animal feed, but many advocates feel that the voluntary standards don’t go far enough and want FDA to institute binding, mandatory, limits on the use of antibiotics that preserves the use of antibiotics for sick animals. In the meantime, consumer advocacy around meat, including public outcry to “pink slime,” has created a drumbeat around meat without drugs.

Recent Articles About Antibiotics

Hospitals Say “No” to Meat Raised with Antibiotics

By , and on May 20, 2013
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On April 8, the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center stepped into the debate about antibiotic use in animal agriculture. Under the guidance of physicians and foodservice staff alike, UCSF’s Academic Senate unanimously approved a resolution to phase out the procurement of meat raised with non-therapeutic antibiotics and urged all ten University of California campuses to do the same. This resolution is not just a symbolic decision – serving over 650,000 meals per year to patients, staff, and the community, and with a food budget of close to $7 million, UCSF and its food purchasing choices have the power to send a strong message to the market and to policymakers.  Read more

Good News Amidst the Unappetizing: Turkey Raised Without Antibiotics Less Likely to Carry Superbugs

By on May 6, 2013

The independent product testing organization Consumer Reports, which regularly tests and rates a raft of consumer products—from lawnmowers, to washing machines, to baby monitors, to cars—recently focused its meticulous consumer product testing methods on America’s turkey burgers, releasing the results of their new study of ground turkey samples from around the United States. The findings were simultaneously unappetizing and encouraging. Read more

New FERN Story Looks at Antibiotic Resistance in Livestock

By on May 1, 2013

In the latest report by the Food & Environment Reporting Network, out today in May/June issue of Eating Well magazine, looks at the growing issue of antibiotic resistance due to the routine use of antibiotics in livestock production. Reporter Barry Estabrook, author of the New York Times bestselling book Tomatoland, details how livestock are fed a diet laced with low “sub-therapeutic” doses of antibiotics, not to cure illness, but to make the animals grow faster and survive cramped living conditions. Read more

Superbugs Invade America’s Supermarket Meat

By on April 16, 2013

The latest round of tests by federal scientists, quietly published in February, has documented startlingly high percentages of supermarket meat containing antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to a new Environmental Working Group analysis.

EWG’s analysis of data buried in the federal government’s National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System has found that store-bought meat tested in 2011 contained antibiotic-resistant bacteria in 81 percent of raw ground turkey, 69 percent of raw pork chops, 55 percent of raw ground beef and 39 percent of raw chicken parts. Read more

Surprise: Antibiotics Are Allowed in Organic Apple and Pear Farming

By and on April 9, 2013

Jack Jones (who asked that his real name not be used) takes care of a small organic pear orchard for a farmer south of the San Francisco Bay Area. This spring, as the trees have begun to blossom, he’s been spraying them with a small amount of the antibiotic tetracycline to prevent a disease called fire blight.

Last year, when the perfect storm of warm, wet air first brought the bacteria to the farm, he tried removing infected branches and getting rid of cover crops, which were providing nitrogen that fed the disease. But to no avail—the disease had established itself in the trunks.

“It just devastated the orchard. We lost 80 percent of our trees in one season,” he recalls. Read more

Serving Up a Safer Food System: Celebrating the “Pope of Pork” and Meat Raised Without Drugs

By on April 4, 2013

In the livestock industry, heroes don’t always get their due. Perhaps that’s because the story of our modern animal agriculture system is so often so bleak—for farmers, animals, our health and the health of our environment.

In the U.S. pork sector, two-thirds of hog production comes from producers working under contract with mega-processors like Smithfield and Cargill. Processing is increasingly automated and farmers feel the pressures of high volume, low cost meat production. In confined animal feeding operations or “CAFOs”, pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in superbug-breeding warehouses, crowded with pens and gestation crates as far as the eye can see. Hogs are raised for maximum weight gain and routinely given antibiotics to speed up growth and prevent the very kinds of diseases that spread when so many animals live in such close, unsanitary and stressful quarters. Read more

New Film Project to Highlight Antibiotic Resistance

By on February 21, 2013

The development of antibiotics in the mid-20th Century revolutionized public and personal health.  Ironically, the early success of antibiotics also fostered a culture, that persists to this day, in which the efficacy of the drugs are taken for granted and the need for new research and development is grossly undervalued.  After years of misuse these medical miracles are now failing, at an alarming rate, and the supply of new options is paltry at best. Now public health and some of the crown jewels of modern medicine – such as transplant surgery and chemotherapy — rest precariously on a small handful of increasingly ineffective drugs. Read more

Time For the Livestock Industry to Move in the Right Direction on Antibiotic Use

By on February 12, 2013

As the proverb goes, if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. Unfortunately, new data released by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this week shows that the livestock industry continues to move in the wrong direction on antibiotic use—digging all of us into a deeper “hole” when it comes to the public health crisis of antibiotic resistance.

The data shows continued very high levels of antibiotic sales for meat and poultry production, with a steady uptick in overall antibiotics use in the livestock sector over the last decade, culminating in record high sales in 2011. Read more

How to Stop the Next Pandemic: End Factory Farming

By on January 22, 2013

Is our national habit of eating dead animals dragging us closer and closer to a flu pandemic that could kill tens of millions of Americans? Dr. Michael Greger believes so.

He’s the author of the new book, Bird Flu: A Virus of Our Own Hatching, and he recently came on our show, The Big Picture, to ring the alarm bell.

“Up to sixty million Americans get the flu every year,” he said before asking, “What if it turned deadly?”

The question wasn’t exactly rhetorical. Read more