Congress Ponders Livestock Antibiotic Ban

Bill to preserve human health would also elevate animal welfare

Thanks to antibiotics, you are 20 times less likely to die from a simple infection in 2009 than you would have been if you had lived before the discovery of antibiotics less than a century ago. Penicillin was the first antibiotic to be discovered, and was not even known to be medically useful until World War II. Since then, this revolutionary “miracle drug” has saved millions upon millions of lives, but reckless agribusiness policies could render penicillin all but useless if we don’t change our self-destructive ways.

Today, doctors can prescribe hundreds of different types of antibiotics to treat everything from skin infections and food poisoning to tonsillitis and STDs, but you know what happens when we use antibiotics when we don’t really need them? Bacterial organisms evolve and become resistant to antibiotics, effectively neutralizing medicine's power to fight disease. And today, because of the irresponsible overuse and misuse of antibiotics, we face a crisis of epidemic proportions with the development of mutant superbugs — extremely hazardous bacterial strains that, through natural selection, have survived and grown so powerful that they cannot be stopped using conventional antibiotics.

Phactory Pharming

Shockingly, most antibiotics in the U.S. are not given to sick people, but to animals on factory farms. It is estimated that 70% of all antimicrobials administered in this country (about 25 million pounds a year) are fed to livestock who are then eaten by people, making the population at large more vulnerable to antibiotic-resistant bacteria and less responsive to treatment. And it’s not just meat eaters whose health and safety are compromised by the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in agriculture — it’s vegans too, because pathogens and pharmaceutically-active compounds can be transmitted to us through animal feces that winds up in our food and water.

Why, you may ask, are farmers feeding antibiotics to herds and flocks of ostensibly healthy animals raised for meat, milk and eggs? Well, because they generally start out healthy when they are born, but after spending some time densely packed together in cages or sheds where they get no sunlight, fresh air or exercise, and passing their days wallowing in their own feces, fighting for their little bit of space, and eating food that they were never meant to eat, they tend to get sick. So farmers force animals to live in sickening conditions to increase profitability, and put antibiotics in their feed to accelerate their growth and so they won’t all simply die from the infectious bacterial diseases that profligate in these darkened dens of filth. And then, of course, when animals really do get sick, antibiotics no longer work properly because they've been taking them for so long that their bodies have developed an immunity.

Over time, factory farms become virtually perfect laboratories for the creation of new antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains: ideal breeding grounds where microbes can learn to adapt and metamorphose into new and more potent forms. One of the most deadly permutations brewed so far on the factory farm is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), a disease transmitted from pigs to humans which now claims more lives in the U.S. — approximately 18,000 victims a year — than the AIDS virus. Symptoms of MRSA include massive pimples (that most commonly sprout on the face, under the arms, behind the knees, and on the butt), as well as fatal heart failure.

Ban the Insanity

To address the myriad problems described above, U.S. Representative Louise Slaughter introduced a bill last week called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009 (PAMTA for short) that would prohibit the sub-therapeutic use of seven classes of antibiotics on farm animals by amending the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. In addition to making antibiotics more effective in the treatment of human disease, decreasing the frequency and duration of hospital visits, and perhaps preventing a future superbug from causing the next Black Plague, PAMTA would save the U.S. an estimated $4 to $5 billion a year on healthcare costs. Plus, it would force factory farms to treat their animals somewhat better, because without the convenient crutch of antibiotics to lean on, producers will have to improve living conditions for livestock just to get them to market.

For example, studies have found that simply providing animals with a more sanitary environment does at least as much to prevent bacterial infection as the routine administration of non-therapeutic antibiotics, and decreasing population densities on factory farms would reduce the amount of contaminated waste they produce. In addition, the unnatural diet fed to farm animals causes them to suffer chronic health problems, so they are summarily given antibiotics as a preventive measure against disease. If sub-therapeutic antibiotics are banned in agriculture, farmers will have to provide animals, for all practical purposes, with healthier food and better living conditions based purely on fiscal considerations.





Use the alert from the Pew Charitable Trusts to urge your congressional representative to promote human health and farm animal welfare by co-sponsoring and supporting PAMTA. To have the most impact, customize the sample letter using your own words, and follow up with a quick phone call or letter to your legislator.