The National Task Force for Combating Resistant Bacteria recently released a five-year action plan to tackle the growing problem of antibiotic resistance. While the plan takes several important steps necessary to control the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, it misses the opportunity to call for critical reforms in the agricultural sector that are essential to protect public health.
President Obama gets an A for tackling this problem from multiple angles, but in terms of addressing the biggest problem, the troubling overuse and misuse of antibiotics on large factory farms, the administration gets an incomplete.
This lack of action to address the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture is notable in the face of recent commitments by several major retailers to curtail the purchase of meat raised with the routine use of the drugs. For instance, McDonald’s recently announced it will phase out chicken raised with medically important antibiotics in its U.S. restaurants. This policy will likely do more to confront the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture than the policies recommended in today’s plan.
In 2013, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that antibiotic resistance could be the “next pandemic,” and the agency has reported that 2 million Americans are sickened and 23,000 are killed by antibiotic-resistant infections every year.
Factory farms are playing a game of chicken with superbugs, and our ability to treat infections big and small may end up losing. While fast food restaurants are taking the lead on confronting this issue, our national laws are not keeping up.
Up to 70 percent of antibiotics sold in the U.S. are given to livestock and poultry, which regularly get their helping of the drugs whether they’re sick or not.
Industrial agriculture is the biggest consumer of antibiotics in the United States. Animals are routinely fed these drugs so that they can grow faster with less feed and remain healthy in the unsanitary, disease-laden conditions common on factory farms. This widespread overuse, however, leads to the creation of drug-resistant bacteria, and these superbugs make their way off the farm and into the surrounding environment, threatening public health across the country.
Experts around the globe, from the World Health Organization to the CDC, agree that steps to immediately and significantly reduce antibiotic use on factory farms are essential to curb the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
That’s why as part of CoPIRG’s campaign to end the overuse of antibiotics, we’ve mobilized hundreds of college students at University of Colorado Boulder and Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and Colorado State University, to weigh in with McDonald’s and show that consumers want them to stand up for public health and help protect antibiotics. Recognizing this growing public health threat, several retailers, including McDonald’s Corporation, Chick Fil-A, Chipotle, Panera and Illegal Pete’s and Good Times Restaurants here in Colorado, have made strong commitments to stop or reduce their purchase of meat raised with life-saving antibiotics.
However, the national plan issued today does not recommend similar strong action. It does not ask the agencies to reduce antibiotics administered for disease prevention – the bulk of use on farms – and does not mandate compliance with national guidance.
As detailed in a recent report released by CoPIRG, entitled “Weak Medicine,” such an approach is unlikely to lead to a significant reduction in antibiotic overuse on animal farms.
Farmers already purchase a majority of antibiotics under FDA rules that allow them to feed drugs to their healthy livestock to prevent diseases, rather than to treat existing infections. And all classes of antibiotics that can be used to promote growth can also be used to prevent diseases. Therefore, these voluntary guidelines may do nothing more than simply require factory farms to claim that these drugs are being used for disease prevention, rather than actually address their overuse.
We urge the administration to keep up with the retail sector and go further to limit the use of antibiotics to when animals are truly sick or directly exposed to illness. The medical community, consumers, and even many in the food industry would likely stand and applaud such a move.
The plan will direct federal agencies to take several actions that will combat the accelerating spread of superbugs that are increasingly resistant to antibiotics and are more difficult, expensive and sometimes impossible to treat.
These steps will greatly aid in assessing the extent of the problem and, while not tackling the largest overuse of antibiotics, will still result in some reductions.
Kate Cohen is a campaign organizer for the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, or CoPIRG, in Denver. Reach her at kate@copirg.org.
