Progress Curtailing the Use of Antibiotics in the Feed and Water of Animals
UCS achieved major legislative victories in the summer of 2008 in our campaign to curb antibiotic resistance in humans by reducing the unnecessary use of antibiotics in CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations). Put together, the new legislation moves us toward the goals embodied in the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), a bill in Congress to curtail the use of these drugs in the feed and water of animals that are not sick.
PAMTA contains three main sections. Thanks to thousands of calls and letters from UCS activists, provisions related to two of these three sections passed this summer as part of other bills. The recently passed Animal Drug User Fee Act included a provision that, for the first time, would require companies to report data to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the use of antibiotics in animal settings. In addition, the Food and Farm Bill, enacted into law in June 2008, authorized new research on the prudent use of antibiotics in agriculture. PAMTA's central section--reviewing the safety of antibiotics already approved for use in the feed and water of CAFO animals and revoking approvals for those uses found to cause drug resistance--remains to be passed by Congress. But thanks in part to ongoing support from UCS activists, Congress is closer than ever to taking this critical final step.
An estimated 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are regularly added to the feed of livestock and poultry that are not sick--a practice with serious consequences for our health. Bacteria that are constantly exposed to antibiotics develop antibiotic resistance. This means that when humans get sick from resistant bacteria, the antibiotics prescribed by doctors don't work.
This legislation is especially important, coming at a time when new studies have found a link between deadly methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria and CAFO practices.
UCS also praised federal regulators for taking aggressive steps to limit the use of important human antibiotics in CAFOS. The FDA recently banned all off-label uses of two kinds of cephalosporin antibiotics in food animals. These drugs are explicitly approved for use to treat respiratory infections in livestock and prevent infections in chicks, but veterinarians, like doctors, often prescribe medications for other uses. The FDA stepped in to ban off-label use of the cephalosporins because these drugs are particularly valuable to human medicine and scientific studies showed that off-label use poses a risk of creating antibiotic-resistant diseases.
