We applaud Tyson's decision to produce fresh chickens without antibiotics. Healthy livestock does not need them.
Tyson Foods announced a change in policy recently that bodes well for consumers and scientists rightly concerned about the indiscriminate use of antibiotics. Tyson will no longer use antibiotics to raise chickens sold as fresh in stores, ending a practice still used by some livestock producers - routinely mixing antibiotics with animal feed to prevent infection and promote growth.
Public health advocates and others have pushed producers to stop the practice out of fears it was contributing to growing antibiotic resistance in bacteria that make humans sick.
Representatives of Keep Antibiotics Working, a coalition of groups opposing the practice, including Rebecca Goldburg, a senior scientist for Environmental Defense, acknowledge that using antibiotics for healthy animals is only part of the problem. Doctors who indiscriminately dispense antibiotics and patients who take them improperly are also culpable.
But giving antibiotics to healthy animals is medically unsound. Europe stopped the practice years ago. It doesn't make economic sense, either. A study last year by Johns Hopkins researchers, using data from poultry producer Perdue, found that antibiotics slightly accelerated chicken growth but that any gain was offset by the cost of the drugs.
Tyson, Perdue and others began cutting back heavily on antibiotics years ago in part because of pressure from large customers such as McDonald's.
But pressure goes only so far. The ultimate answer is a bill by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Rep. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) and others that would require livestock producers to phase out the use in feed of antibiotics that are also important in human medicine.
What Tyson and other companies have done deserves praise and shows the clout that consumers can wield. But there remains a need for the federal government to step in for the sake of public health.
For more information on the problem, go to www.keepantibioticsworking.comMilwaukee Journal Sentinel
