Asked about an EU-style ban on preventive use of antibiotics, an FDA spokesperson responded, “The laws in the US and our livestock population are not the same as that of the EU or other countries. It’s unlikely the FDA will follow in Europe’s footsteps any time soon. Activists with the environmental organization Greenpeace campaign against the excessive use of antibiotics in livestock farming in front of an outlet of discount food retailer Lidl, in Berlin on July 25, 2017. That critical step is expected to slash the continent’s antibiotic use further. Last year, the EU implemented perhaps its most significant reform yet: banning the routine use of antibiotics to prevent disease, reserving their use for only when animals are actually sick. From 2011 to 2021, antibiotic sales for use in livestock fell by almost half across the European Union, and use per animal is now around half that of the US. Public health advocates want to see the FDA take the threat much more seriously, and often point to Europe as a role model. In 2019, antibiotic-resistant bacteria directly killed over 1.2 million people, including 35,000 Americans, and more than 3 million others died from diseases where antibiotic resistance played a role - far more than the global toll of HIV/AIDS or malaria, leading the World Health Organization to call antibiotic resistance “one of the biggest threats to global health, food security, and development today.” It’s a sobering turn of events with life-and-death implications. The chicken industry, which had led the pack in reducing antibiotic use on farms, bought 12 percent more antibiotics in 2021 than in 2020. Now, in a concerning course reversal, antibiotic sales for use in livestock ticked back up 7 percent from 2017 to 2021, per a new FDA report. But according to Matthew Wellington of the Public Interest Research Group, the FDA’s reforms went after the low-hanging fruit, and they didn’t go nearly far enough. Thanks to those two actions alone, sales of medically important antibiotics for livestock plummeted 42 percent from 2015 to 2017. Want to eat less meat but don’t know where to start? Sign up for Vox’s five-day newsletter full of practical tips - and food for thought - to incorporate more plant-based food into your diet. ![]() Sign up for the Meat/Less newsletter course But it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that the FDA finally took the basic steps of requiring farmers to get veterinary prescriptions for antibiotics and banning the use of antibiotics to make animals grow faster - steps that some European regulators had taken a decade or more prior. A foundational component of modern medicine was starting to crumble. Over time, once easily treatable human infections, like sepsis, urinary tract infections, and tuberculosis, became harder or sometimes impossible to treat. ![]() This in turn has made those precious, lifesaving drugs less effective for people. By 2009, US agriculture companies were buying up two-thirds of what are termed medically important antibiotics - those used in human medicine. ![]() The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew that America’s meat industry had a drug problem.įor decades, evidence had amassed that the widespread use of antibiotics to help chickens, pigs, and cattle grow faster - and survive the crowded conditions of factory farms - was causing bacteria to mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics.
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