Everybody knows that it is possible to have too much of a good thing -- and that is true also of antibiotic drugs, the great lifesavers of modern medicine. But the worst threat of their unrestrained use is not about doctors writing scrips for their human patients. It is about their regular use in treating farm animals who are not sick.
Farmers use drugs pre-emptively to keep livestock healthy, to promote growth and to compensate for the unsanitary conditions of industrial-style farms. It is estimated that 70 percent of the antibiotics used in the United States are fed to farm animals for nontherapeutic purposes.
One of the consequences of this profligate usage is the rise of "superbugs" that have grown resistant to antibiotics and thus are less effective in treating humans. The most notorious example is MRSA, a type of staph infection, which kills about 18,000 American annually. Yet as some farmers have demonstrated both here and overseas, filling animals full of drugs is not necessary to make a living.
The problem is well documented and has been widely reported, most recently by Katie Couric on the "CBS Evening News," but that doesn't mean the bottom line self-interest of Big Pharma and Big Ag is suddenly going to go away and take these unhealthy practices with it. It is going to take federal legislation -- and Congress has an ideal vehicle to move ahead.
The Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009 would phase out of agriculture the nontherapeutic use of seven classes of antibiotic drugs with human applications, subject to certain exemptions that could be granted by the secretary of agriculture -- for example, if it is shown that a drug is critical to the rearing of animals.
Two versions of the same bill have been introduced -- HR 1549, sponsored by Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-New York, the only microbiologist in the chamber, and S 619. Both are before their appropriate committees. Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter supports the legislation, but it needs representatives in this region to rally to it.
The legislation has wide support in the medical community, including the American Medical Association and the American Public Health Association, and just reading the legislative findings provides a chilling reminder why: "... if current trends continue," the legislation states, "treatments for common infections will become increasingly limited and expensive, and, in some cases, nonexistent."
To the peril of its citizens, this nation is taking the pearls of modern drugs and almost literally casting them before swine. Congress must make it stop.Pittsburgh Post Gazette
