Louise Slaughter: Congress' only Microbiologist is trying to regulate the drugs
Willy Blackmore
Takepart.com
Fri, 27 Mar 2015
Since 1999, U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter has been either a sponsor or a cosponsor of the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. On Tuesday, the New York congresswoman once again reintroduced the bill, which would block eight different classes of antibiotics that are critical to human medicine from nontherapeutic uses in agriculture.
It's a long time to keep working on one bill and one issue, but Slaughter, who is trained as a microbiologist, is runner-up to another federal government heavyweight in having a decades-running concern about the damage to public health that could come from the industry-standard practice of routinely feeding livestock antibiotics to promote growth: the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA promised to limit the use of antibiotics in agriculture way back in 1977 but only managed to enact voluntary regulations in 2013 - 36 years later. Still, the voluntary rules leave a significant loophole that allows for regular nontherapeutic doses of antibiotics to be recast as "disease prevention," allowing the continuation of what more or less every major public health group says is a dangerous status quo.
Which is why Slaughter was once again speaking at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, telling reporters:
"Right now, we are allowing the greatest medical advancement of the 20th century to be frittered away, in part because it's cheaper for factory farms to feed these critical drugs to animals rather than clean up the deplorable conditions on the farm."
Recent announcements from McDonald's and Costco, which are both taking significant steps to cut antibiotics out of their poultry supply chains, signal progress from private industry. But a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says the agriculture industry used 63,151 tons of antibiotics globally in 2010—the authors couch that as a conservative estimate—and projects that the amount with increase by 67 percent by 2030. In the United States, 80 percent of the antibiotics sold annually go to the livestock industry.
Currently, two million people are sickened by resistant bacterial infections annually, and 23,000 die every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The collective cost of the problem is $20 billion a year. Unfortunately, the livestock industry's lobbying dollars—which range between $2 million and $3 million annually, per Open Secrets, and lean heavily toward Republicans—will make the bill's passage unlikely.
Comment: Read more about how factory farms may be killing us:
http://www.sott.net/article/233260-What-the-USDA-Doesnt-Want-You-to-Know-About-Antibiotics-and-Factory-Farms
http://www.sott.net/article/224420-FDA-Report-Alarming-Amounts-of-Superbugs-in-Supermarkets
http://www.sott.net/article/235167-Growing-Concern-Over-Drugs-Fed-to-Animals
http://www.sott.net/article/267003-CDC-reveals-disturbing-truth-about-factory-farms-and-superbugs
The fact that antibiotic-resistant superbugs are found so widely in US meat supplies is a major red flag; a sign that we are nearing the point of no return where superbugs will continue to flourish with very little we can do to stop them.
Willy Blackmore
Takepart.com
Fri, 27 Mar 2015
Since 1999, U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter has been either a sponsor or a cosponsor of the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. On Tuesday, the New York congresswoman once again reintroduced the bill, which would block eight different classes of antibiotics that are critical to human medicine from nontherapeutic uses in agriculture.
It's a long time to keep working on one bill and one issue, but Slaughter, who is trained as a microbiologist, is runner-up to another federal government heavyweight in having a decades-running concern about the damage to public health that could come from the industry-standard practice of routinely feeding livestock antibiotics to promote growth: the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA promised to limit the use of antibiotics in agriculture way back in 1977 but only managed to enact voluntary regulations in 2013 - 36 years later. Still, the voluntary rules leave a significant loophole that allows for regular nontherapeutic doses of antibiotics to be recast as "disease prevention," allowing the continuation of what more or less every major public health group says is a dangerous status quo.
Which is why Slaughter was once again speaking at a press conference on Tuesday afternoon, telling reporters:
"Right now, we are allowing the greatest medical advancement of the 20th century to be frittered away, in part because it's cheaper for factory farms to feed these critical drugs to animals rather than clean up the deplorable conditions on the farm."
Recent announcements from McDonald's and Costco, which are both taking significant steps to cut antibiotics out of their poultry supply chains, signal progress from private industry. But a study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says the agriculture industry used 63,151 tons of antibiotics globally in 2010—the authors couch that as a conservative estimate—and projects that the amount with increase by 67 percent by 2030. In the United States, 80 percent of the antibiotics sold annually go to the livestock industry.
Currently, two million people are sickened by resistant bacterial infections annually, and 23,000 die every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The collective cost of the problem is $20 billion a year. Unfortunately, the livestock industry's lobbying dollars—which range between $2 million and $3 million annually, per Open Secrets, and lean heavily toward Republicans—will make the bill's passage unlikely.
Comment: Read more about how factory farms may be killing us:
http://www.sott.net/article/233260-What-the-USDA-Doesnt-Want-You-to-Know-About-Antibiotics-and-Factory-Farms
http://www.sott.net/article/224420-FDA-Report-Alarming-Amounts-of-Superbugs-in-Supermarkets
http://www.sott.net/article/235167-Growing-Concern-Over-Drugs-Fed-to-Animals
http://www.sott.net/article/267003-CDC-reveals-disturbing-truth-about-factory-farms-and-superbugs
The fact that antibiotic-resistant superbugs are found so widely in US meat supplies is a major red flag; a sign that we are nearing the point of no return where superbugs will continue to flourish with very little we can do to stop them.
