Agriculture Has Increased Its Overwhelmingly Medically Unnecessary Use of Antibiotics by 16 Percent — during an Era that Supposedly Was Trying to Corral Escalating Antibiotic Resistance

© 2014 Peter Free

 

04 October 2014

 

 

This is what happens, when greed is not offset by common sense rule-making and enforcement

 

The FDA’s September 2014 addition to the 2012 Summary Report on Antimicrobials Sold or Distributed for Use in Food-Producing Animals indicated that:

 

 

Several observed trends from 2009 through 2012 include:

 

The total quantity of antimicrobial active ingredients sold or distributed for use in food-producing animals increased by 16%.

 

In 2012, sales and distribution (domestic and export) of antimicrobials approved for use in food-producing animals was approximately 14.8 million kilograms.

 

Domestic sales and distribution of antimicrobials approved for use in food-producing animals were approximately 14.6 million kilograms (approximately 99%), and export sales were approximately 139 thousand kilograms . . . .

 

In 2012, domestic sales and distribution of medically important antimicrobials accounted for 61% of the domestic sales of all antimicrobials approved for use in food-producing animals.

 

Of these sales, tetracyclines accounted for 67%, penicillins for 11%, macrolides for 7%, sulfonamides for 6%, aminoglycosides for 3%, lincosamides for 2%, and cephalosporins for less than 1%.

 

Because of confidentiality constraints, sales and distribution data for other drug classes of medically important antimicrobials approved for use in food-producing animals cannot be further reported . . . .

 

Center for Veterinary Medicine, 2014 Summary Report on Antimicrobials Sold or Distributed for Use in Food-Producing Animals, Food and Drug Administration (September 2014) (at pages 5, 15, 16)

 

 

The overwhelming majority of these drugs are not used in sick animals

 

They are used, instead, to promote rates of growth and to lower the frequency of disease in grossly overcrowded living conditions.

 

This impressive 3 year increase (in the unnecessary agriculture use of antibiotics) took place during a period of rising awareness that antibiotic overuse is rapidly escalating the development of multidrug resistance in bacteria.

 

(For background on the subject of antibiotic resistance, see here, here and here.)

 

 

Notice the FDA’s phrase — “confidentiality constraints”

 

It appears on page after page of the agency’s summary.

 

In other words, business interests trump the public’s right to know which industry practices, and on what scale, are actively threatening its health.

 

 

Abused confidentiality demonstrates (in token) how corporatism enslaves the regulatory agencies that are supposed to blunt excesses that threaten the common good

 

The US Department of Agriculture, arguably, often acts like just another front for “business as usual” corporatized agriculture.

 

A similar perspective can be implied in regard to the World Health Organization, which has (almost incomprehensibly) steered away from doing much about antibiotic overuse around the world.

 

The FDA itself has been comparatively silent over the years.

 

 

The moral? — Government fails, when it ignores the common good

 

The finding that agriculture’s medical misuse of antibiotics dramatically increased — during the period that the world was supposedly becoming more alarmed about escalating antibiotic resistance — shows how conceptually silly the idea that “markets will take care of everything” is.

 

This “screw the common good” phenomenon is just another aspect of what happens when obvious costs are externalized out of the accounting budget.

 

Agriculture and the medical infrastructure are getting free rides on the backs of people, who get sick (and often die), while infected with difficult to control or unstoppable “bugs”.

 

Everybody profits, except the ill people. Whom, one would think, it was (and is) government’s role to protect. In the case of unnecessarily escalating antibiotic resistance and economically dried up drug-development pipelines, that’s all of us.