Mandate antibiotic ban

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

I've had personal experience with this issue. Seven years ago I was hospitalized because I had a throat infection due to an antibiotic resistant bacteria.

The FDA on Wednesday offered another toothless plan in its slow-motion effort to phase out the rote use of certain antibiotics in livestock feed. The agency hopes to curb the overuse of antibiotics for nonmedical reasons in the country's food production. But by making the plan voluntary, little is likely to change.

"It is important to use these drugs only when medically necessary," the FDA said on its website. "Governments around the world consider antimicrobial-resistant bacteria a major threat to public health."

Why treat a major threat to public health with voluntary recommendations?
If it's important to only use theses drugs when medically necessary, why can they still be used as a "preventive protectant" and to aid growth of farm animals?

Currently, up to 70 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States are given to healthy animals, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit think tank. About 29.9 million pounds of antibiotics were sold in 2011 for meat and poultry production, compared with the 7.7 million pounds sold for human use.

An FDA report released in April showed that 81 percent of all the raw ground turkey the agency tested was contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, CNN reported. And turkey wasn't the only problem -- antibiotic-resistant bacteria were found in about 69 percent of pork chops, 55 percent of ground beef and 39 percent of chicken.

-more-

http://www.heraldnet.com/article/20131212/OPINION01/712129957

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Captured agency...

[Warpy]

2. Let's hope the fact that antibiotics are losing their effect on livestock

means that the livestock will no longer be able to be kept overcrowded in factory farming operations, from the appalling conditions of pigs in factory farms to the chickens who never see daylight in big chicken sheds to the feed lots to fatten perfectly good grass fed cattle.

If you've ever smelled any of these operations in August, you know why they're overusing antibiotics on food animals.

It has to stop. It will stop because it no longer works. It worked for an astonishingly brief time.

Just cook everything well so the bugs will be dead.

[laundry_queen]

3. Unless they stop feeding antibiotics to animals

to stop them from dying in factory farm conditions, HUMANS will be the ones to start dropping like flies once the resistant bacterial strains take hold. Once again, profit trumps human life. The market decides.