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.

First, the bad news:

Consumer Reports found high levels of antibiotic-resistant bacteria on turkey meat that was raised conventionally—that is, with the routine use of antibiotics. Unfortunately, Consumer Reports’ findings for turkey are not outliers. The Food & Drug Administration (FDA) samples many more meat products than Consumer Reports and finds high rates of antibiotic-resistant pathogens on meat. Detecting these “superbugs” on meat is a sign that the resistant bacteria generated in conventional factory farms through careless use of antibiotics are leaving these facilities.

However, Consumer Reports’ analysis of turkey raised without unsafe uses of antibiotics also delivers some good news: our meat industry doesn’t have to be this way.

According to Consumer Reports, ground turkey labeled “no antibiotics,” “organic,” or “raised without antibiotics” was as likely to harbor bacteria as products without those claims; BUT—and this is an important but—the bacteria found on those products were less likely to be resistant:

“When we focused on antibiotic use, our analysis showed that bacteria on turkey labeled “no antibiotics” or “organic” were resistant to significantly fewer antibiotics than bacteria on conventional turkey. We also found much more resistance to classes of antibiotics approved for use in turkey production than to those not approved for such use.”

This is no surprise. As Consumer Reports notes, antibiotics aren’t allowed in turkeys labeled “organic,” “no antibiotics,” or “raised without antibiotics.” Sick birds may be treated, but they’re then sold to non­organic markets.

What this tells us is that just like in human medicine, when antibiotics are misused, we risk breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria. But when antibiotics are used appropriately, we are less likely to foster the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in meat production. [You can hear more about the Consumer Reports investigation in this great NBC Nightly News segment.]

Antibiotic resistance is now a major public health problem. Drug-resistant infections are harder for doctors to treat, can lead to longer illnesses, more hospital stays, and even death when treatments fail.

Unfortunately, antibiotics are being misused and overused on a massive scale in our conventional meat industry. Today, four times the amount of antibiotics are used on the turkeys, chickens, pigs and cows that end up on our plates than on humans. Even worse, the vast majority of the use is not to treat animals when they get sick. Instead, antibiotics are fed routinely to these animals to speed up growth and prevent diseases associated with poor living conditions. This practice is a key culprit in the proliferation of bacteria resistant to the kinds of antibiotics we humans rely on when we get sick and that can’t easily be knocked out by them.

While catching any kind of foodborne bug is no fun, most people are able to handle a foodborne illness without needing treatment. But if the illness requires treatment, when the bacteria are resistant, it can escalate what could be an easily treatable condition into a serious health threat for that individual.

Meat is just one of the ways in which resistant superbugs can leave livestock feedlots and make us sick. Resistant bacteria can travel off the farm in air, water, soil, and on workers, and can easily share their resistance traits with other bacteria.

You can do your part to protect yourself and your family—and support farmers who are good stewards of our precious antibiotics—by looking for alternatives to conventional meat in your local grocery store.

Meats labeled USDA Organic, those which say “no antibiotics administered” and carry the USDA Process Verified seal, as well other labels which certify practices are your best options. If certified labels are not available, consider labels with producer claims of “no antibiotics administered”.

Just as importantly, speak up. Ask your supermarket butchers and store managers if the meat they’re selling comes from animals raised with the routine use of antibiotics and ask them to carry meat that was responsibly produced. The more they hear from their customers, the more responsibly produced alternatives will find their way to our meat aisles.

This post originally appeared on the NRDC Switchboard.

“The low doses kill many bacteria,” Estabrook writes, “But some develop mutations that make them immune to the same drugs that once destroyed them.” Eighty percent of all antibiotics in the U.S. are used in livestock production.

The story comes out on the heels of a new study by Consumer Reports that shows that antibiotic-free turkey is less likely to be contaminated with resistant-bacteria. The findings strongly suggest that the routine use of antibiotics in animal production has led to increased antibiotics resistance when the drugs are used to treat human illnesses. In addition, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released updated consumer advice this week, in which its scientists discussed the connection between treated animals and resistant strains of bacteria in humans.  

Estabrook reports that incidences of MRSA, or resistant infections of Staphylococcus aureus, in the U.S. more than doubled between 1999 and 2005, from 127,000 to 280,000, and MRSA-related deaths rose from 11,200 to 17,200. He pointed out that a study published in 2011 showed that MRSA, which has been found on livestock farms that use antibiotics, was getting into meat. Researchers analyzed 136 samples of beef, poultry and pork from 36 supermarkets in California, Illinois, Florida, Arizona and Washington, D.C. Nearly one-quarter of the samples tested positive for MRSA.

Estabrook notes that a recent study tested the farmers of large hog operations for MRSA. Not one of those who avoided antibiotics tested positive, while nearly half the farmers who routinely used antibiotics on their pigs carried resistant bacteria. Not everyone who carries the resistant bacteria gets sick, however, and the article points out that proper cooking of meat will kill bacteria.

“Perhaps it’s no coincidence that while the quantity of antibiotics administered to humans has remained stable, the amount fed to livestock has soared,” he writes. According to the FDA records, antibiotic use on farms grew from about 18 million pounds in 1999 to nearly 30 million pounds in 2011.

The piece notes a seminal 1976 study, which showed that low doses of antibiotics bred E. coli resistance in chickens and also among the farmers that raised them. A year later, the FDA announced plans for a ban on feeding livestock low doses of antibiotics, but it never came to pass.

In Denmark, Estabrook explains, incidences of resistant bacteria fell dramatically in both people and animals after low-dose antibiotic usage in livestock production was banned in 2000. Meanwhile, pork production rose. The European Union banned sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock production in 2006.

In the U.S., Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, a Democrat from upstate New York and a microbiologist by training, has repeatedly tried to legislate limits on the use of the drugs in animals, without success.

You can read the full report here at Eating Well and also here on FERN’s Web site.

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.

“Consumers should be very concerned that antibiotic-resistant bacteria are now common in the meat aisles of most American supermarkets,” said EWG nutritionist Dawn Undurraga, the report’s principal author. “These organisms can cause foodborne illnesses and other infections.  Worse, they spread antibiotic-resistance, which threatens to bring on a post-antibiotic era where important medicines critical to treating people could become ineffective.”

EWG researchers found that 53 percent of raw chicken samples were tainted with an antibiotic-resistant form of Escherichia coli, also known as E. coli, a microbe that normally inhabits feces and can cause diarrhea, urinary tract infections and pneumonia. The extent of antibiotic-resistant E. coli on chicken is alarming because bacteria readily share antibiotic-resistance genes.

As well, EWG found that antibiotic resistance in salmonella is growing fast: of all salmonella microbes found on raw chicken sampled in 2011, 74 percent were antibiotic-resistant, compared to less than 50 percent in 2002.

A significant contributor to the looming superbug crisis is the unnecessary antibiotic usage by factory farms that produce most of the 8.9 billion animals raised for food in the U.S. every year. Industrial livestock producers routinely give healthy animals antibiotics to get them to slaughter faster or prevent infection in crowded, stressful and often unsanitary living conditions.

Pharmaceutical makers have powerful financial incentives to encourage abuse of antibiotics in livestock operations. In 2011, they sold nearly 30 million pounds of antibiotics for use on domestic food-producing animals, up 22 percent over 2005 sales by weight, according to reports complied by the FDA and the Animal Health Institute, an industry group. Today, pharmaceuticals sold for use on food-producing animals amount to nearly 80 percent of the American antibiotics market.

“Slowing the spread of antibiotic resistance will require concerted efforts, not only by the FDA and lawmakers, but by pharmaceutical companies, doctors, veterinarians, livestock producers and big agribusinesses,” said Renee Sharp, EWG’s director of research. “It’s time for big agribusiness to exercise the same restraint shown by good doctors and patients: use antibiotics only by prescription for treatment or control of disease.”

The federal Food and Drug Administration’s efforts to address antibiotic abuse in livestock operations consist of only voluntary guidance documents – not regulations that carry the force of law. EWG takes the position that the FDA must take more aggressive steps to keep antibiotic-resistant bacteria from proliferating in the nation’s meat supply.  Livestock producers must not squander the effectiveness of vital medicines.

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) has introduced the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), aimed at curbing overuse of antibiotics on farms.

“Consumers need protections on the food they eat now,” said Craig Cox, EWG’s vice president of natural resources and agriculture. “And they need a new farm bill that will help producers reduce their use of antibiotics and level the playing field for farmers and ranchers committed to more sustainable ways to raise livestock.”

Consumers can reduce their exposure to superbugs by eating less factory-farm meat, buying meat raised without antibiotics, and following EWG’s downloadable Tips to Avoiding Superbugs in Meat. They can also order a wallet card for a small donation and view a detailed label decoder.

This project was partially funded by an educational grant from Applegate.

This post originally appeared on Environmental Working Group.

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.

About half of the remaining 90 trees were a variety called Warren, which is immune to fire blight. For the rest, he decided to spray the tetracycline as a preventative measure, and is replanting the rest of the orchard with other varieties that are resistant to the disease.

It may shock you to discover that antibiotic use in organic apple and pear orchards is routine. In fact, tetracycline has been on the national list of synthetic production materials allowed in organic farming since the mid-’90s. Even so, antibiotic use in fruit production has largely gone unnoticed by the public, until now. With more focus on the larger issue of antibiotics in animal production—which accounts for nearly 80 percent of the antibiotics sold every year in the U.S.—a growing number of consumer advocates are sounding the alarm.

The growth in public awareness coincides with internal debate about the future of antibiotic use in organic orchards. Ahead of The National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) (the decision-making body behind the federal organic standards) meeting this week in Portland, Oregon, where members will discuss just how much longer farmers like Jones can continue routine use of antibiotics like tetracycline or streptomycin to control fire blight, several issues remain unresolved.

UPDATE: On April 12, 2013, ABC News announced that the National Organic Standards Board will not allow growers to use tetracycline past October, 21, 2014.

To read the rest of this story, please visit Take Part.

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.

The pork industry is not alone. Did you know that millions of pounds of antibiotics are used in U.S. factory farms every year?  Sales of antibiotics for use in livestock production reached record highs in 2011, with four times the amount of antibiotics going to chickens, pigs, and cows  that aren’t sick than to people who are—the vast majority used essentially as a substitute for better management practices.

But the really scary part is what happens next. Fed to animals at low levels day after day, the antibiotics kill the weakest bacteria, leaving behind the bacteria that are hardest to kill. It’s like millions of animals are not “finishing their course” of antibiotics, the way our doctors instruct us to do when they prescribe antibiotics to us.

These drug-resistant bacteria multiply and become “superbugs” that can’t be knocked out by ordinary medicines. Superbugs spread from feedlots on workers, through water, air and on meat, putting millions of people at risk of getting seriously ill. If a child catches one of these, a simple ear infection could put her in the hospital – or worse. At the same time, few new antibiotics are being developed. No less a public health authority than the Director General of the World Health Organization recently warned about a “post-antibiotic era”, in which things “as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.”

But there is a silver lining. Actually, there are thousands of them. Thousands of farmers from coast to coast are showing that there’s a better, more sustainable, and profitable way to produce meat without reliance on antibiotics. Today, I’m so proud that NRDC is honoring one such farmer: Russ Kremer, winner of the 2013 Growing Green Award in the Food Producer Category. Russ and these other food leaders give us new models of hope.

Known as the “Pope of Pork” (read Barry Estabrook’s feature “The New Pork Gospel” to find out why), Russ is a fifth-generation pork producer and now a driving force in the movement for more sustainably-raised, antibiotic-free livestock. But it wasn’t always this way.

Notice: this is a pretty terrific story.

Fresh from college in the early 1980’s, Russ opened a CAFO in Missouri with the goal of increasing his pig yield. His animals were tightly confined and injected with antibiotics day after day. Then, one day in 1989, Russ was gored by one of his Yorkshire boars and contracted an antibiotic-resistant infection that sent him to the hospital to fight for his life. The same, aggressive drug-resistant superbug that had been bred on his farm because of his production methods nearly killed him.

Realizing the dangers of how he had been raising pigs, Russ made a big change. He exterminated his herd and started fresh on a 150-acre farm in Frankenstein, Missouri, raising diversified heirloom pigs. Taking lessons from his grandfather’s generation, Russ designed a natural feeding program: free of antibiotics, meat byproducts, steroids, or any unnecessary chemicals or additives. He built pig housing that incorporated deep bedding, natural ventilation, and lots of space for his hogs to move around, as well as paddocks to rotationally graze pigs on meadows and woodlands.

Today, Russ raises livestock in a sustainable, holistic, and diversified operation that prioritizes animal welfare, human health and ecology. Here’s what life on Russ’s farm looks like:

Russ is proud that his pigs have been drug-free for over 25 years. According to Russ, after weaning, his pigs survive at a rate of nearly 99 percent and rarely get sick. He’s also virtually eliminated the $16,000 he was previously spending each year in veterinarian and animal treatment-related costs.

But Russ didn’t stop with his own farm. He was determined to prove that this type of sustainable farming could be profitable and healthier for other pork producers too. He organized the Ozark Mountain Pork Cooperative, a farmer-owned pork cooperative that now includes 52 farm families and created a small, community-based processing plant in the Ozarks. The original 35 co-op farm families all went through major conversions, transitioning from the antibiotic-dependent CAFO-based model they, like Russ, had been using to raise their livestock without antibiotics. The co-op, with their brands Heritage Acres and Fork in the Road, has built a profitable, vertically coordinated production, marketing, and distribution system, and cultivated relationships with major retailers and restaurant chains across the country. Didn’t I tell you it’s a terrific story?

While antibiotics are essential to modern medicine, they are not essential to livestock production. Russ and his fellow farmers are living proof that we can produce meat in ways that don’t require massive reliance on these precious miracle drugs.

Here’s Russ in his own words on his Growing Green award win:

“I share this NRDC honor with farmers who have had the courage to buck dangerous conventional production trends by transforming their raising operations into models of hope. These producers are living proof that we can grow profitable and sustainable food production systems that put health first and preserve the efficacy of life-saving medicine, while also treating animals humanely.”  

The honor is all ours, Russ. Congratulations from all of us here at NRDC!

This post originally appeared on the NRDC Switchboard.

This is an important piece of legislation concerning one of the most pressing public health issues of our time—antibiotic resistance. The Director General of the World Health Organization has warned, bacteria are becoming so resistant to common antibiotics that it could mean “the end of modern medicine as we know it,” and “[t]hings as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.” Just this January, the UK’s top medical official described an “apocalyptic scenario” in 20 years’ time, in which simple operations could lead to death from routine infections “because we have run out of antibiotics.” CDC counts antibiotic resistance among its “top concerns.”

The abuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture is contributing to the growing public health crisis of antibiotic resistance. The science overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that the use of antibiotics in livestock production poses a risk to human health. An honor roll of medical and scientific groups agrees that “[o]veruse and misuse of important antibiotics in food animals must end, in order to protect human health.”

PAMTA is aimed at doing exactly what its name suggests, preserving the effectiveness of antibiotics, with a focus on stopping the indiscriminate use of antibiotics on cattle, swine, poultry, and other livestock animals when the animals are not sick. Eighty percent of all antibiotics sold in the US are for use in animals. The vast majority of that use is to speed up animal growth and to compensate for the dangers of crowded, unsanitary conditions. Such use is contributing to the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria which threatens the continued effectiveness of these essential medicines.

Sure, human use is part of the problem, and must be addressed. But doctors have been making progress on that front. Prescriptions for antibiotics in the US declined by 13 percent between 1997-98 and 2005-06. And sales of antibiotics for human use has held pretty steady between 2000 and 2011, hovering below the 8 million pound mark. Not so with the sale of antibiotics for use in livestock, which has grown from about 22 million pounds in 2001 to nearly 30 million pounds in 2011. (Click to see the great graphic from our colleagues at Pew, for more on that comparison). The use of antibiotics in livestock has gone virtually unchecked in the US in the last half century, exploding from about 7 million pounds in sales in 1970 to about 30 million pounds in 2011.

PAMTA represents a welcome check on that use. It would require the Food and Drug Administration to phase out the use of antibiotics on animals that are not sick and don’t need the antibiotics, i.e. non-therapeutic uses, unless there is a reasonable certainty that such use will not harm human health. It would continue to allow the use of antibiotics to treat sick animals.

This is only common sense. We need antibiotics to work for sick children and other people who need them, and we shouldn’t be squandering them on animals that are not sick to compensate for crowded, dirty conditions at factory farms that could be addressed with better management practices.

PAMTA is needed because, so far, the basic response to the problem from the FDA, the agency responsible for controlling the use of antibiotics in livestock, has been to stall and shrug, even while acknowledging the problem. FDA first proposed to stop the use of penicillin and tetracyclines in animal feed in 1977 because of the risks to human health from antibiotic resistance associated with such use. It then largely sat on its hands for the next 35 years, even as citizen groups petitioned FDA for action. In 2011, NRDC and our partners sued FDA to compel it to act, and last year a federal court directed FDA to take action on the problem in two separate decisions. So far FDA’s primary response has been to push voluntary measures which make flawed recommendations and require no action from industry. FDA has also appealed the court decisions. FDA must be required to do more. PAMTA would require FDA to take meaningful, timely action to address this problem.

That is why NRDC has joined over 400 organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the American Public Health Association, the National Association of County and City Health Officials, and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, in supporting PAMTA.

Originally published by NRDC

If the news seems dire, it’s because it is. But there is still cause for hope if scientists, citizens, and institutions, can work collaboratively to find new ways to outwit the bad bacteria that make us sick without harming the good bacteria we need to live. In our new film RESISTANCE we’ve traveled across the U.S., to Canada, and to Europe to speak with patients, politicians, farmers, economists and some of the world’s experts in microbiology and infectious disease to collect the successes and failures we need to understand if we’re to resistance from driving fatal infections back to, and perhaps beyond, rates not seen since before antibiotics were first available.

A hypothetical look at our nation’s food system offers a useful metaphor for understanding our current relationship to antibiotics. Imagine that we had developed an affordable way to grow healthy, nutritious, food that, as long as we kept it fresh and did not eat too much of it, could revolutionize the quality of human life on earth. Now imagine that instead of conserving this miracle food we consumed it recklessly and with very little understanding of the long-term implications of doing so. Then add to this equation a variable dictating that once one of these foods tips over into being unhealthy, or at least not pro-health, there is almost no way to recuperate it’s health-inducing properties. I know, hard to imagine such a thing happening to our food supply (sigh), but replace food with antibiotics in the scenario above and that is essentially the current state of affairs.

While antibiotics are vital to human medicine they’re equally important for the health of our animals, especially those raised for food. Yet a wealth of scientific data suggests that the way antibiotics are currently used on industrial-scale American farms actually increases the risk of untreatable infections in the animals on those farms. To this point, there’s been a good deal of coverage on Civil Eats and elsewhere of a recent government report that shows that nearly 30-million of the 37-million pounds of antibiotics used in the U.S. are administered on conventional animal farms.

Most of that use, moreover, is for so-called extra-label use; that is, used not to treat sick animals, but administered in feed and water to synthetically promote growth and putatively guard against infection. Supporters of the status quo in industrial animal farming claim that any human health-risks posed by extra-label use are greatly overstated and do not justify the economic costs that would result from banning antibiotics. Yet a consensus among leading medical associations and health groups (from the Infectious Diseases Society of America to the CDC ) warns that a high volume and frequency of antibiotic use in any context, including and maybe especially on an industrial farm, exacerbates antibiotic resistance.

Needless to say, this subject is large and complex and is greatly inflected by politics economics and the unfolding of science. The goal of our film then is to present a clear-eyed view of the issues and the stakes with the goal of empowering viewers to make informed choices for themselves and their families with regard to antibiotics in the their food and in their medicine.  If you’re interested in learning how we got to this point and, perhaps more importantly, what we can do to protect ourselves and our loved-ones from these dangerous infections please take a minute to visit our project site here.

Visit our Kickstarter page to learn how you can support the production of RESISTANCE.

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.

Kudos to our colleagues at Pew for putting together the great graphic showing the alarming trend (above).

The vast majority of all those antibiotics sold for use in livestock aren’t being given to chickens, pigs and cows that are sick. Instead, they are being mixed in with food and water and fed to food animals routinely to promote faster growth and prevent disease in crowded, stressful, and unsanitary conditions—essentially as a substitute for better management practices.

These conditions create the perfect environment for those bacteria that are resistant to the antibiotics to multiply and thrive, creating more and more antibiotic-resistant “superbugs”. In fact, you really could not design a better system for guaranteeing the spread of antibiotic resistance.

Superbugs can’t be knocked out with the usual medicines. If a child catches one of these, a simple ear infection could put her in the hospital – or worse. A broad coalition of prominent medical and public health groups have warned that the “overuse and misuse of important antibiotics in food animals must end, in order to protect human health.”

Unfortunately, other new data published the same day shows increases in antibiotic-resistance among bacteria on retail meat. Detecting superbugs on meat is a sign that the superbugs generated on factory farms through careless use of antibiotics are leaving these facilities.

Here’s Congresswoman Louise Slaughter, author of The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), legislation aimed at curbing the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture, on these findings:

“We are standing on the brink of a public health catastrophe. The threat of antibiotic-resistant disease is real, it is growing and those most at risk are our seniors and children. We can help stop this threat by drastically reducing the overuse of antibiotics in our food supply, and Congress should act swiftly to do so today.”

But while these pathogens can and do travel on meat, meat is just one of the ways they can enter our environment. Resistant bugs can travel out from feedlots through livestock and meat processing workers who come into contact with contaminated animals or meat, through water, soil, and air that comes into contact with contaminated animal waste, and through bacteria sharing resistance traits/genes with one another. Nonpathogenic bacteria can even share these traits with pathogenic bacteria.

This all can lead to antibiotic resistant capabilities being spread far and wide and ending up in the bacteria on a doorknob or on a piece of unwashed fruit or in a hospital where they can result in really severe illnesses.

The bottom line is that we when get sick, we want medicines that work. While many things contribute to the growing problem of antibiotic resistance, including inappropriate uses of antibiotics in human medicine, the scale of misuse and overuse of antibiotics in the livestock industry is so large it simply dwarfs all other uses of antibiotics. In order to address the growing crisis of drug-resistant infections, we must take steps to reduce the overuse and misuse of antibiotics in animal agriculture.

This year, Congress will be an important battleground in this effort.

The Animal Drug User Fee Act (ADUFA) is up for renewal, providing an opportunity to win new antibiotic use reporting requirements—reforms that are critical because the public is currently in the dark about drug use trends and the prevalence of high risk practices. Even something as basic as which animals species are being treated with which drugs is not currently reported. New federal requirements for antibiotic use reporting and disclosure will allow us to better understand where the antibiotics are being used, for what purposes, and whether we are making progress on reducing antibiotics reliance on the part of livestock producers.

This post originally appeared on the NRDC Switchboard.

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.

We do know that the flu is already deadly. Hundreds, sometime thousands, of Americans do die every year from the regular seasonal flu, which according to the Center for Disease Control has a mortality rate of about two-tenths of one percent.

A particularly severe and infectious form of influenza struck the world in 1918 infecting a third of the global population and killing as many as 100 million people. In the United States, that flu took the lives of more than a half-million Americans. Unlike the average seasonal flu that we’re confronting today with a mortality rate of .2%, the 1918 strand of influenza had a mortality rate of 2.5%. It was the worst plague in history.

But what if a strand of influenza swept across the nation that was twenty-five times deadlier than the 1918 strand? What if we were dealing with a flu pandemic that had a 60% mortality rate?

Here’s the frightening news: We already are.

An extremely deadly and contagious form of bird flu, H5N1, has already infected people in several countries including densely populated China and Indonesia, as well as Thailand, Vietnam, and Egypt, among others.

Just in 2012, known cases of H5N1 bird flu in Cambodia killed 90% of those infected. In China, 65% died. In Indonesia, the mortality rate was 83%. And in Laos and Nigeria, the mortality rate was 100% – every single person who got it, died.

If the 60 million Americans who get the flu every year suddenly got this particular strand of the flu, H5N1, then upwards of 40 million Americans would die. It would be a disaster on a scale never before seen in this nation other than, possibly, how Europeans wiped out Native Americans when they first brought the flu from Europe. And if it spread around the rest of the world, it would make the Black Plague of the 14th century look like the common cold.

Dr. Greger warned: “It’s like crossing one of the deadliest known human diseases, Ebola, with one of the most contagious known diseases, influenza.” He added that the single factor that was most likely to cause this is factory farming.

We should be doing everything we possibly can to defend against this apocalyptic pandemic. Yet, each day we as a nation continue factory farming, we’re tempting fate.

That’s because the only thing stopping the H5N1 influenza from killing billions around the planet is the H5N1 flu itself. Only about 600 people have been infected so far by this flu, simply because it hasn’t yet mutated to a form that can more easily infect humans.

As Dr. Greger said, “Right now, H5N1 is good at infecting the viral receptors that coat the trachea or windpipe of birds. It needs to mutate to better attach to human receptors.” He continued, “But there’s evidence that there is a strand in Indonesia and Egypt acquiring those mutations.”

Jamming birds together in factory farming slaughterhouses, beak to beak, and pumping them up with antibiotics promotes these mutations. Now that local small, family farms and local-supermarket butchers have been replaced by giant transnational slaughterhouses, we’ve seen a radical and rapid increase in mutant strains of the flu, along with other diseases that come from factory farms like the newly-mutated and now deadly forms of E. Coli and Salmonella.

“We’ve domesticated bird for thousands of years,” Dr. Greger noted. “It’s really just been in the last few years where we’ve seen this unprecedented emergence of these highly pathogenic strains, which have killed hundreds of billions of birds.”

Factory farms, according to Dr. Greger, are the, “perfect storm environments for the emergence and spread of these super-strains of influenza.”

Other consequences of factory farming are well known. Our national diet now has more meat it in it than ever before, thus accelerating heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and other illnesses that are responsible for increasing healthcare costs.

Factory farms requires enormous food and water. And, according to a report by the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation, 51% of all greenhouse gas emissions are the direct or indirect result of giant factory farms raising cattle, pigs, and poultry.

In other words, factory farming is hurtling our planet toward catastrophic climate change.

But so far, these reasons haven’t been strong enough to really motivate us to change. Americans and policymakers haven’t been ready to move away from the factory farm model to bring back local farming and reform our diet by eating fewer dead animals.

But, if nothing else, the fear of a worldwide pandemic that kills more than half the human race should motivate us to change how we farm and how we eat.

Let’s hope. Because whatever joy we as a nation get out of eating chicken wings will be far outweighed by the catastrophe of watching millions of our fellow humans die.

To save the human race, we need to end factory farming now.

This article was first published on Truthout.

Image credit to Shutterstock.

Antibiotics are lifesaving medicines. But overusing them can have unintended consequences. That’s what we’re seeing on industrial farms where these drugs are being used on a massive scale in a way that threatens the public’s health. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), nearly 30 million pounds of antibiotics are sold each year for use in food animal production, most often to make the animals grow faster and to compensate for overcrowded and unsanitary conditions. By comparison, drug makers sold about 7 million pounds of these products last year to treat sick people.

The FDA, the U.S Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all testified before Congress that there is a definitive link between routine use of antibiotics in animal production and the crisis of resistant infections in humans. New research indicates that overuse of antibiotics in animal feed is contributing to diseases not usually associated with food. These include drug-resistant urinary tract infections and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus – better known as MRSA. Even World Health Organization director general Margaret Chan warned earlier this year that the “post-antibiotic era” is getting closer every day and would represent “an end to modern medicine as we know it” in which “things as common as strep throat or a child’s scratched knee could once again kill.”

There is a better way. We can feed the world without overusing these drugs to produce meat and poultry.

The place to begin is with more information. The U.S. Animal Drug User Fee Act — passed by Congress in 2008 and administered by the FDA — requires drug manufacturers to report total sales of antibiotics in food animals. This is a small but important step in the right direction. The FDA now has the statutory authority to find out how many tons of antibiotics are purchased for use on industrial farms. But we need to know more, and the opportunity to do so is just around the corner.

The act is up for renewal in 2013, with a “must pass” deadline of September 30. Congress should work aggressively to give the FDA authority to collect information that will answer two big questions: Which food animals are being given antibiotics? And for what purpose — growth promotion, disease prevention or treatment? Armed with better data, the agency can more precisely tailor its policies to preserve antibiotic uses that advance human and animal health while ending practices that disguise poor production habits and serve no treatment purpose.

Second, what’s good for people should be good for animals. Antibiotics such as penicillin, erythromycin, and tetracycline cannot be sold to humans without a doctor’s prescription. That’s common knowledge. What’s less well known is that anyone can walk into a feed store, or go online, and buy these same drugs for animals without veterinary supervision. This obvious inconsistency needs to end. Fortunately, the FDA has announced an end to over-the-counter antibiotic sales for animals. Now it should move as quickly as possible to finalize a rule that would require veterinarians to oversee all antibiotic use on industrial farms.

Finally, the FDA and Congress, together, can take action to make sure antibiotics are used for treating sick animals or to control disease before it destroys an entire herd or flock, not as a way to promote growth or compensate for unsanitary conditions. Earlier this year, the FDA issued draft guidelines designed to stop the misuse of these drugs. While Pew welcomes this step, the agency may still allow antibiotics to be used to mask outmoded production practices. The FDA should strengthen and finalize its guidelines without delay.

Congress should also pass the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. Sponsored by Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and others, this bill ensures that antibiotics vital for treating sick people will no longer be fed to animals for non-therapeutic reasons.

Every time we use an antibiotic, we contribute to the emergence of drug-resistant bacteria. We must use these medications more conservatively — and that means using them only to treat sick animals. Other major meat-producing nations have successfully put their livestock on an antibiotics diet — and the Obama administration is starting to move in this direction. 2013 should be the year that industrial animal agriculture finally makes a resolution to end this practice — and sticks to it.

An earlier version of this story appeared on The Huffington Post.