Antibiotics Used as Animal Feed Additives

Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production

This commission was formed to conduct a comprehensive, fact-based and balanced examination of key aspects of the farm animal industry. From this site one can download the Final Report, "Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America". At the beginning of this report, there are the following interesting comments:
      "There have been some serious obstacles to the Commission completing its review and approving consensus recommendations. The agriculture industry is not monolithic, and the formation of this Commission was greeted by industrial agriculture with responses ranging from open hostility to wary cooperation. In fact, while some industrial agriculture representatives were recommending potential authors for the technical reports to Commission staff, other industrial agriculture representatives were discouraging those same authors from assisting us by threatening to withhold research funding for their college or university. We found significant influence by the industry at every turn: in academic research, agriculture policy development, government regulation, and enforcement.
     At the end of his second term, President Dwight Eisenhower warned the nation about the dangers of the military-industrial complex - an unhealthy alliance between the defense industry, the Pentagon, and their friends on Capitol Hill. Now, the agro-industrial complex - an alliance of agriculture commodity groups, scientists at academic institutions who are paid by the industry, and their friends on Capitol Hill - is a concern in animal food production in the 21st century."

• Vancomycin-Resistant Enterococci Outside the Health-Care Setting: Prevalence, Sources, and Public Health Implications
• National Center for Infectious Diseases
• DBMD Home Page
• National Antibiotic Resistance Monitoring System - Enteric Bacteria
• Bacterial Resistance to Antimicrobial Agents: Selected Problems in France, 1996 to 1998

National Research Council

Union of Concerned Scientists

• Misuse of Antibiotics in Animal Agriculture

Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) Home Page

• Protecting the Crown Jewels of Medicine - A strategic plan to preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics. Report written by Patricia Lieberman and Margo Wooten, May 28, 1998.

• Antibiotic Resistance and Animal Agriculture

Animal Health Institute

• The Antibiotics Debate - Benefits of using antibiotics in food animals

Food Safety - The EU Integrated Approach

General Discussions of Antibiotic Resistance in Bacteria

• Recent reports on antibiotic-resistant bacteria found in meat
• The Problem of Antibiotic Resistance - NIH Report, April 2004
• House of Lords - Science and Technology - Seventh Report
• A strategic plan to preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics
• Miracle Drugs vs. Superbugs, by Tamar Nordenberg
• Infections Fighting back, Newshour Transcript -- January 8, 1998
• The Rise of Antibiotic-Resistant Infections, an article by Ricky Lewis, Ph.D., geneticist and textbook author

Farm Use of Antibiotics

• Lecture by Robert Lawrence - Reported by Heidi Marttila-Losure, Ames Tribune, Oct. 23, 2007
• Water, antibiotics and Animal Farm - A U.S. ban on sub-therapeutic antibiotic use in livestock production is long overdue.
• Antibiotic Growth Promoters in Food Animals, Peter Hughes and John Heritage, June 24, 2002
• CSPI News Release: FDA Should Ban the Use of Certain Antibiotics to Fatten Farm Animals, Groups Ask.
• Letter to Dr Henney of the FDA, signed by health authorities and organizations, asking that subtherapeutic use of antibiotics in agriculture be curtailed
• Agricultural use of antibiotics and the evolution and transfer of antibiotic-resistant bacteria
Dr. George G. Khachatourians, Department of Applied Microbiology and Food Science, College of Agriculture, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Sask. has written this paper for the Journal of the Canadian Medical Association, Nov. 3, 1998. It is a well-documented presentation of the connection between overuse of antibiotics, in both human medicine and agriculture, and the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. He states that the recommended levels of antibiotics for feeds were just 5-10 ppm in the 1950s but have been increased by 10- to 20-fold since then. This shows directly that bacteria have developed resistance to the antibiotics used in animal feed. (The statement about the increased level may be true for tetracycline, but it is almost certainly does not apply to all antibiotics).
• BBC News | Antibiotics | Farmers warned of antibiotic threat - A report by the BBC on antibiotic resistance, Sept. 1999.
• Danish report on antibiotic resistant bacteria

Specific Antibiotics and Bacteria

• MRSA Watch. United Kingdom
• Superbug putting schools to the test - article in the Chicago Tribune, Oct. 23, 2007
• Mayo Clinic information on MRSA

Cefquinome

• FDA may approve drug despite warnings from its own staff.

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