We recently published a piece that revealed Big Meat is back to their old tricks of abusing antibiotics to make livestock (and profits) grow fatter quicker and to guard against livestock sickness in the filthy conditions of factory farms. That piece, “Reckless Antibiotic Use in Beef Sold by Fast Food Giants, Grocery Chains, Walmart” also revealed that major retailers are serving up this antibiotic-laden meat filled with dangerous resistant bacteria to their customers across the U.S. This is a significant problem for human health because (1) human over-exposure of antibiotics through food have rendered the drugs ineffective for treating common human infections like urinary tract infections (UTI), and life-threatening infections, and (2) antibiotic-resistant bacteria thrives in the food animals and then that contamination from resistant bacteria is passed on from the food to humans.

This Vox journalist piece explores the meat industry’s ongoing love affair with antibiotics, the politics behind why it is allowed to continue despite the increase in human deaths from infection in which no antibiotics will work now…

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Big Meat just can’t quit antibiotics

Meat production is making lifesaving drugs less effective. Where’s the FDA?

“The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) knew that America’s meat industry had a drug problem.

For decades, evidence had amassed that the widespread use of antibiotics to help chickens, pigs, and cattle grow faster — and survive the crowded conditions of factory farms — was causing bacteria to mutate and develop resistance to antibiotics. By 2009, US agriculture companies were buying up two-thirds of what are termed medically important antibiotics — those used in human medicine. This in turn has made those precious, lifesaving drugs less effective for people.

Over time, once easily treatable human infections, like sepsis, urinary tract infections, and tuberculosis, became harder or sometimes impossible to treat. A foundational component of modern medicine was starting to crumble. But it wasn’t until the mid-2010s that the FDA finally took the basic steps of requiring farmers to get veterinary prescriptions for antibiotics and banning the use of antibiotics to make animals grow faster — steps that some European regulators had taken a decade or more prior.

Thanks to those two actions alone, sales of medically important antibiotics for livestock plummeted 42 percent from 2015 to 2017. But according to Matthew Wellington of the Public Interest Research Group, the FDA’s reforms went after the low-hanging fruit, and they didn’t go nearly far enough. Now, in a concerning course reversal, antibiotic sales for use in livestock ticked back up 7 percent from 2017 to 2021, per a new FDA report. The chicken industry, which had led the pack in reducing antibiotic use on farms, bought 12 percent more antibiotics in 2021 than in 2020.