I watched the Frontline program “The Trouble With Antibiotics” Tuesday evening.
The meat industry’s response to the emerging crisis in the creation of superbugs due to the overuse of antibiotics is discouraging.
Eighty percent of the antibiotics sold in America are used in animals.
Antibiotics make chickens, cows, and pigs grow faster, thus increasing profits for producers. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention call antibiotic resistant pathogens one of America’s top five health problems, the meat industry insists on continuing business as usual.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration adopted voluntary guidance on the use of antibiotics in animals last year. The agency said antibiotics should only be used for sick animals, and when used, they need to be prescribed by a veterinarian.
During the Frontline program, FDA commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg, M.D., looked uncomfortable discussing the issue and how the agency failed in a 1977 effort to regulate antibiotic use in animals. The industry, assisted by a powerful congressman Rep. Jamie Whitten (D-Miss.), the longtime chair of the subcommittee that controlled the FDA’s budget, beat back the effort.
Hamburg said the agency recently chose the voluntary route because it believed more could be accomplished faster than through regulation.
A recent FDA report shows that antibiotic use in animals is continuing to grow rapidly, with a 16 percent increase from 2009 to 2012.
Consumer groups are concerned the voluntary guidelines adopted in 2013 are too weak to stem this growing antibiotic use.
Researchers were interviewed whose studies showed that people coming into a hospital with MRSA lived close to pig farms.
Other researchers described testing more than 1,200 urinary tract infection samples and their preliminary results that showed a genetic link in more than 100 of them to supermarket meats.
So, it seems, this is just another case of corporations using American consumers as a big experiment.
Consumers are in danger. The FDA needs to take stronger action to drastically reduce the use of antibiotics in animals grown for food. Superbugs are going to continue to mutate rapidly with the current over use of antibiotics, rendering important antibiotics useless in treating sick people.
The United States uses much higher levels of antibiotics in food animals than other nations. For example, it uses six times as much as is used in Norway and Denmark.
You can contact Frontline to get a disk of the program or listen to it in a podcast.
