Antibiotics
 Unless
the meat and dairy products you buy at your local
supermarket are labeled "antibiotic free" you can be fairly
certain the animal your food came from was fed an abundance
of antibiotics. In fact, more than 70% of the antibiotics
used in the United States is given to farm animals, largely
to fatten them and to make them grow.
Why should
this concern you?
One of the
problems is that bacteria become resistant to antibiotics
through overexposure. It will require larger doses of an
antibiotic to cure an infection caused by resistant
bacteria; sometimes the antibiotic will not work at all. The
routine use of antibiotics on factory farms has been linked
to increased incidence of antibiotic resistance in humans.
The effectiveness of drugs that are needed to treat disease
is being endangered.
Health
experts are calling for cutbacks in the
excessive application of drugs to farm animals.
Subtherapeutic use of antibiotics means using them at levels
that carry production claims such as increased rate of
weight gain or improved feed efficiency in clinically
healthy animals, or at levels generally below the optimum
therapeutic level used for clinically sick animals. In the
debate over the use of antibiotics in agriculture, a
distinction is usually made between therapeutic and
subtherapeutic uses. Public-health advocates don't object to
treating sick animals with antibiotics; they just don't want
to see the drugs lose their efficacy because factory farms
are feeding them to healthy animals to promote growth. But
the use of antibiotics in feedlot cattle confounds this
distinction. Here the drugs are plainly being used to treat
sick animals, yet the animals probably wouldn't be sick if
not for what we feed them and the environment we place them
in.
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