FDA has helped to create antibiotic-intensive livestock system of US
Photo: iStock The United States is the world’s third largest consumer of antibiotics for animal agriculture. Most of the use is in the highly concentrated pig and cattle sectors. Just 3,600 swine-raising facilities produce 73 per cent of the over 235 million pigs produced in the US each year. Less than 600 operations produce 75 per cent of all US feedlot cattle.
These enormous livestock facilities, raising tens of thousands of animals, routinely feed antibiotics to counter unhealthy conditions and practices. The end result is high antibiotic use. For example, US pig producers use about three times as much antibiotics to raise a pig as pig producers in the United Kingdom. US cattle producers use about five times as much antibiotics as producers in Denmark.
Read more: Antimicrobial resistance: How factory farming is destroying our planet
However, there is one bright spot when it comes to antibiotic use in US animal agriculture. Over ten years ago, the chicken industry started competing as to who could raise chickens with fewer antibiotics. The end result is that most chickens raised in the US do not receive antibiotics that are in the same classes as antibiotics used in human medicine.
The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has, for the most part, helped to create the antibiotic-intensive livestock system that dominates US animal agriculture. The FDA is tasked with reviewing antibiotics before approval for use in animals to make sure they are safe and effective. While the Agency has at times taken steps to restrict antibiotic overuse, its day-to-day operations are aimed at approving new drugs and making them available to livestock producers. The World Antimicrobial Resistance Awareness Week takes place from November 18-24 every year.
Once drugs are on the market, the FDA struggles to address newly identified safety problems, even when these safety issues are very apparent. The FDA has failed to create indicators that could be used to measure its progress on addressing antibiotic resistance, has aided the creation of a livestock industry that relies on regular and routine use of antibiotics in feed and water to compensate for unhealthy living conditions, and has failed to implement even the most basic monitoring of how and why antibiotics are raised in food animal production.
The FDA has taken some — very limited — steps to address these issues. In the 1970s, after the problem of antibiotic resistance from the overuse of antibiotics in livestock became apparent, it started requiring drug makers to submit tests showing their products would not create a resistance problem if they were going to be used in feed for more than 14 days.
This resulted in some feed additives having a 14-day duration limit, which likely has helped limit some overuse. The FDA also at that time tried to withdraw approvals for feed uses of penicillin and tetracyclines, but never followed through.
Decades later in 2003, the FDA began requiring new antibiotic approvals for use in animals to be evaluated to see if they created a risk of resistance. During the discussion about the new approach the FDA stated they intended to look at old approvals as well. They did this for a few drugs, but when the results came back that some of the old approvals failed evaluations, the FDA notified the companies and then did nothing else.
In 2005, the FDA banned the use of the critically important class of drugs fluoroquinolones for use poultry when evidence showed its use was making it harder to treat foodborne infections. The result is lower levels of resistance to fluoroquinolones in US poultry than in most other countries. In 2008, the US legislature required the FDA to begin collecting and reporting data on sales of antibiotics for use in animals.
This was a big step forward and it was improved over time by requiring the drug makers to estimate what species were receiving the drugs. Still, the sales data fail to provide information on why antibiotics are used and do not distinguish types of production such as laying chickens versus chickens raised for meat.
Finally, in 2017 the FDA completed a plan that prohibits the use of medically important antibiotics for growth promotion. This led to a 43 per cent drop in sales of medically important antibiotics, but sales have gone up since then.
Read more: Antimicrobial resistance: Here are some practices that can improve milk quality, cattle health
The US and US FDA still fail to follow important international expert recommendations on reducing the risk of antibiotic resistance in the food system. First, the US has failed to put in place any indicators to measure progress of its efforts to address the antibiotic resistance crisis. The US should follow the example of countries that signed the Muscat Manifesto to set targets for reduction in antibiotic use in agriculture.
So far, the FDA and other US government agencies have rejected any calls for reducing antibiotic use in agriculture and have instead only been willing to discuss reducing the need for antibiotics, essentially assuming that current use is needed. The US has also failed to create any indicators of resistance in bacteria in the food system.
The US does not follow international recommendations to eliminate or restrict the use of antibiotics for disease prevention. Restricting the preventive use of antibiotics is a recommendation of the World Health Organization Guidelines on the use of Medically Important Antibiotics in Animals.
The US has also not implemented the Codex Alimentarius Code of Practice that states that preventive use of medically important antibiotics should only be used under "exceptional circumstances." In US cattle and swine, use of preventive antibiotics is routine and completely unexceptional. Instead of eliminating routine preventive use the FDA has decided it will address continuous use of antibiotics in animal feed.
Currently about a third of approvals for medically important antibiotics in feed can legally be fed continuously with no duration limit. The FDA has indicated it wants to add duration limits to all medically important drugs, but its current draft proposal suggests any duration shorter than the whole life of the animal will likely be acceptable.
The US FDA has also failed to put in place international recommendations to collect information on how antibiotics are used in food-production. The Agency is currently exploring a voluntary public-private partnership which will give the animal production industry complete control over how the data will be collected and reported.
Like so many of the actions of the FDA related to antibiotic resistance, such as its efforts to create duration limits, its data collection proposal prioritises the needs of the regulated industry over public health. The Agency has so far ignored calls fromz public health advocates to collect data on antibiotics delivered to livestock feeding operations in animals, despite having the legal authority to collect this data.
Sadly, despite a consensus that antimicrobial resistance is a critical global health crisis, actions that inconvenience the giant US meat industry are not considered.
Steven Roach, MA is the Safe & Healthy Food Program Director at Food Animal Concerns Trust
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth
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