October 6, 2014
FDA finds increased use of antibiotics on animals in the US
Public health advocates have expressed their concern about the increased use of antimicrobials in animal feeds as shown by the increasing sales of antibiotics since 2009.
The US exports Food and Drug Administration has just released data indicating that the sale of antimicrobials increased by 8% in 2012 from the previous year. Between 2009 and 2012, the increase was a high 16%.
Medically important antimicrobials accounted for 61% of the sales, according to the FDA''s 2012 summary report.
These data are somewhat corroborated by an investigative report by Reuters, which found several large poultry producers in the US routinely using antibiotics in chicken, even if the animals are not sick at all.
Public health advocates consider the increasing sales alarming because of their implications to human health.
The overuse of antibiotics on farm animals, they said, leads to an increase in antibiotic-resistant pathogens, or disease-producing agents, that affect humans. Keeve Nachman, director of the food production and public health program at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, claimed that most of these antibiotics "are being fed to animals that aren''t (even) sick."
More importantly, these antibiotics, he added, "are important in human medicine."
Particularly alarming, according to Laura Rogers, director of Pew''s Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming, is the use of cephalosporins.
The FDA banned the use of cephalosporins in food animals in January 2012 to preserve their effectiveness in treating sick people. Yet the sales of those drugs still rose that year, Rogers noted.
People in the industry, however, claim that there is little evidence that bacteria that have become resistant to antibiotics also infect people.
"Several scientific, peer-reviewed risk assessments demonstrate that resistance emerging in animals and transferring to humans does not happen in measurable amounts, if at all," Tom Super, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, was quoted by Reuters as saying.
Super claimed that using antibiotics to prevent diseases in animals "is good, prudent veterinary medicine" since prevention of the disease "prevents unnecessary suffering and prevents the overuse of potentially medically important antibiotics in treatment of sick birds."