Tell FDA to Stop Dragging Its Feet On Drug-Resistant Superbugs
Every 15 minutes in the U.S. someone dies from a superbug infection - a dangerous bacterial infection that has become resistant to the antibiotics once used to treat it. Superbug infections develop and spread when antibiotics are overused. Industrial livestock facilities pump animals full of antibiotics to increase weight gain in the unhealthy crowded facilities where animals are raised. The result is twice as many antibiotics are used to produce meat than to treat sick people.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to make sure that antibiotics given to animals are safe and remain effective, but the Agency has a terrible track record when it comes to stopping the overuse of antibiotics that are driving the spread of resistant superbugs. One of the important tools the FDA has for ensuring antibiotic use in animals doesn't lead to superbug infections is a list that ranks the antibiotics by their importance to human medicine. The FDA places more restrictions on antibiotics used in animals that are ranked as more important to human medicine compared with drugs that are less important. This is a very helpful tool, but the FDA hasn't reevaluated or updated the list since its creation in 2003. This means that despite the latest research on resistance and new drug approvals over the last 20 years, some drugs used in human medicine continue to be fed to animals to make them grow faster (bacitracin) and/or can be used without consulting a veterinarian (tiamulin). The lack of these restrictions leads to the overuse of these antibiotics.
Please write to the FDA and tell them to update this list. This is an important step towards weaning the meat industry off of its reliance on the drugs that are leading to deadly superbug infections.
Quit delaying efforts to stop the overuse of antibiotics in meat production. The FDA failed the public when it waited twenty years to update its list of medically important drugs. The FDA should update the medically important list promptly and treat all drugs used in human medicine as medically important including bacitracin and tiamulin. The FDA should also commit to updating this list more frequently. Finally, the FDA needs to stop allowing the meat industry to use antibiotics to counter unhealthy conditions in livestock facilities and instead require the industry to provide healthy living conditions for all animals.
