The American meat industry is addicted to antibiotics. This dates to the late 1940s, when farmers discovered that antibiotics could do more than just cure disease. Antibiotics regularly mixed into feed could help animals avoid common illnesses -- and thus grow faster as well as better withstand the crowded and sometimes unsanitary conditions on factory farms.
Surveys over the last decade by the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that antibiotic usage has become routine: 84 percent of swine farms, 83 percent of cattle feedlots and 84 percent of sheep farms report that they add antibiotics or similar drugs to feed or water to promote animal growth. Some 70 percent of all antibiotics consumed by humans and animals in the U.S. are used by farmers for purposes other than treating animal diseases.The U.S. leads the world in this aggressive use of antibiotics. Frank M. Aarestrup, director of the National Food Institute at the Technical University of Denmark, reported in 2007 that American farmers used 250 to 300 milligrams of antibiotics per kilogram of meat produced. That was tops among the 20 countries Aarestrup compared.
Here's why that's a problem: Over time, bacteria develop a resistance to commonly used antibiotics. The overuse of antibiotics in animals grown for human consumption speeds the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria -- which can jump from animals to humans. So antibiotics we have long relied upon to kill those bugs become less effective and treatable diseases become more difficult to fight.
Two million people a year get bacterial infections while they're hospitalized and 90,000 of them die from the infections, according to the Infectious Diseases Society of America. Some 70 percent of the infections prove to be resistant to at least one drug.
Aside from the health risk, the wide use of antibiotics here poses an economic risk. American farmers' heavy use of antibiotics limits the international market for U.S. food, because countries with more restrictive rules for antibiotics block U.S. imports.
"We do not have the access to the EU [European Union] that we could and [antibiotic use] I think is at least one of the issues that is keeping our exports to the EU down," said Paul Warner, the spokesman for the National Pork Producers Council.
Congress is considering a bill that would phase out, over two years, the use of antibiotics in animal farming except for treating diseases.
The meat industry doesn't like this legislation. It warns that doing away with non-therapeutic antibiotics would hike the cost to food producers of raising animals for slaughter. It would take longer to fatten animals, so the cost of feeding them would go up.
Yes, but the cost of medicating them would go down. Denmark, a country with a large swine industry, banned antibiotic use for growth promotion in 2000. Farmers saw a small increase in feed costs, but that was offset by the decrease in the cost of antibiotics, according to Aarestrup.
The U.S. animal farming industry says that eliminating non-therapeutic antibiotic use would increase the use of antibiotics to fight disease because animals would get sick more often.
Overall, though, there would be a significant decline in the use of antibiotics, and the net cost increase would likely be small. A 2003 Iowa State University study projected that it would cost American farmers an extra $4.50 per head to raise pigs. Retail prices would go up by 2 percent.
By some estimates, treating illness or disease caused by drug-resistant bugs costs the U.S. health-care system $4 billion a year, largely because of longer hospital stays and more use of expensive drugs for treatment.
The evidence says the benefits of phasing out routine antibiotic use among livestock would outweigh the costs. The meat industry can do this by itself -- or wait for Congress.Chicago Tribune
