Overuse of Antibiotics in US Livestock Fuels Antimicrobial Resistance
Updated
Society faces a surging resistance to leading antibiotics, antivirals, and antiparasitic drugs, collectively called antimicrobials. According to the CDC, every fifteen minutes, another person in the United States dies from a drug-resistant infection, often called superbugs. Many individuals have taken antibiotics and such, but, incredibly, more antimicrobials are sold each year for use in farm animals than for humans. Rampantly overprescribed in U.S. livestock, in some parts of the world, they are even used to encourage animals to grow faster. Make no mistake, this unchecked use on farm animals drives human resistance. Presently, as nations around the world were set to establish targets to cut the use of antimicrobials in animal agriculture at an upcoming late September United Nations (UN), Big Agriculture and Big Pharma in the United States have pushed back, dropping the concrete targets from the critical political declaration.
Without concrete targets, many experts are worried that the declaration—which intends to commit countries to a strategy to address the massive problem of antimicrobial resistance, (AMR)—will fail to compel governments to effectively address the problem. Specifically, they fear the declaration will not curb the unchecked use of antimicrobials in farm animals, which, as noted by USRTK, is spurring the development of resistance to critical medicines. Topping deaths from HIV and malaria combined, the crisis presented by AMR is severe, killing nearly 1.3 million people around the world each year. Highlighting the root of the problem, on September 11, Junxia Song, a zoonotic disease specialist at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN in Rome, remarked:
“The misuse of essential drugs in the food production system accelerates the emergence and spread of resistance.”
In order to fully assess the dire situation caused by the overuse of antimicrobials in livestock, there must be a solid system in place to compare the levels of use of medically necessary antibiotics in both human medicine and food-producing animals, also referred to as “livestock.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates animal antibiotics and is required by federal law to ensure that livestock antibiotic use is safe for both animals and humans. So, it stands to reason that the FDA should constantly track where livestock antibiotics are routinely—and excessively—used. Overuse, after all, is helping drive the AMR health crisis. But guess what? The FDA does not perform this tracking. Sound familiar? Unlike the deadly COVID-19 jabs, the CDC at least tries to track and respond to human antibiotic overuse. Yet, the FDA has no working system to track and identify the overuse of these same antibiotics in the nation’s livestock.
It is essential to remember that nearly half of the FDA’s budget comes from “user fees’ paid by companies seeking approval for drugs or medical devices. That’s right. Previously an entirely taxpayer-funded entity, the FDA is now funded by manufacturers that it must also regulate. Thanks to COVID-19, Americans saw firsthand how that arrangement puts big corporations and hefty profits over and above people’s health. It’s foolish to think the FDA will handle the AMR crisis differently, even though AMR has been ranked by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the top global health challenges.
To generally track AMR in intestinal bacteria from humans, retail meats, and livestock at the time of slaughter, the National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) was established in 1996. NARMS is a collaboration between the CDC, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the FDA, and state and local health departments and ties in with the One Health concept that focuses on ways to fight global health issues at the human-animal-environment interface, including emerging zoonotic diseases. But where does the cruel and inhumane overuse of antimicrobials in livestock play in this? Thanks to the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the deep state greed that supersedes individual health will continue, and AMR will surely help fuel the plan.
In statistics that are altogether gloomy, the UN declaration reports that globally, AMR could result in $1 trillion in additional healthcare costs by 2050 and $1 trillion to $3.4 trillion in gross domestic product losses per year by 2030 and that treating drug-resistant superbugs alone could cost upwards of $412 billion annually, coupled with workforce participation and productivity losses of $443 billion. Additionally, the UN declaration states that AMR is predicted to cause an 11 percent decline in livestock production in low-income countries by 2050. To be clear, the UN’s goal to oversee AMR is not about protecting livestock from abuse by the overuse of antimicrobials. It is not about protecting livestock at all. No, indeed. Ultimately, it is about eliminating them.
The final declaration insists it strives to “enhance food safety, food security and nutrition, foster economic development, equity and a healthy environment, and advance the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals.” There you have it. More steps to advance the agenda that will rob humanity of its individual rights and freedoms. We all must become self-sufficient. Migrating to a permanent plan of purchasing all meats, produce, and dairy from local, sustainable, small farms is more important now than ever in our history.