Sneaking Out the Back Door with Its Cowardly Tail between Its Legs — the Food and Drug Administration Declines to Regulate Antibiotic Use in Agriculture, despite Increases in Antimicrobial Drug Resistance that Harms Human Health

© 2011 Peter Free

 

29 December 2011

 

 

Another example of plutocrat-owned government

 

The FDA surreptitiously announced that it will not try to regulate the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, even when the drugs are used solely to promote more rapid meat growth (rather than to cure sick animals):

 

SUMMARY: The Food and Drug Administration (FDA or the Agency) is withdrawing two 1977 notices of opportunity for a hearing (NOOH), which proposed to withdraw certain approved uses of penicillin and tetracyclines intended for use in feeds for food-producing animals based in part on microbial food safety concerns.

 

 

Withdrawal of Notices of Opportunity for a Hearing; Penicillin and Tetracycline Used in Animal Feed, Federal Register 76(246): 79697-79701 (22 December 2011) (also cited as 76 FR 79697)

 

Without first having public hearings, the FDA cannot (legally) newly regulate an item.  Consequently, this notice means that the FDA is not going to make rules governing the use of antibiotics in food animals.

 

 

Why do I can the FDA’s action, “surreptitious”?

 

“Nobody” reads the Federal Register, especially three days before Christmas.

 

Note

 

If you haven’t ever looked at the Federal Register, click on the underlined link in the citation above.

 

Read a few paragraphs.  You will wonder why we pay government employees to write such long tracts of often deliberately obscure non-communication.

 

This obscurantism matters because the Register is the daily journal in which the national government publishes its notices and documents.  Wikipedia explains how this works, here.

 

 

Why should we care about the misuse of antibiotics in agriculture?

 

The more antibiotics are used, the more resistance to them develops in the bacteria that the drugs are supposed to kill or stall.

 

Resistance is such a major medical problem today that there are some bacteria, which are resistant to all antimicrobial drugs.  And all antimicrobial-resistant bacteria dramatically increase the costs of medical treatment.  Not to mention the increased human suffering involved.

 

Agriculture is heavily involved in this public health problem because about 70 percent of all antibiotics are used in healthy animals to promote meat growth.  That means that farming is almost certainly the major promoter of antimicrobial drug resistance.

 

The scary part is that, not only do animals and people share the same kinds of potentially disease-causing microbes, bacteria pass the molecular bits that give them resistance between species.

 

Really eye-opening is the fact that all this “stuff” survives trips through water treatment plants and winds up in the planet’s water.

 

 

Now that you have the background, how does the FDA’s politically-motivated cowardice look?

 

Like a pre-election political ploy done by the Obama Administration to forestall tangling with the various self-interested lobbies that are involved:

 

(a) the pharmaceutical industry

 

(can sell way more antibiotics than necessary, both for healthy animals and for people sickened by the drug-resistant bacteria that agricultural overuse creates)

 

(b) corporate farmers

 

(comparatively cheap and easy way to promote meat growth and more income)

 

(c) medical establishment

 

(gets to treat more and more people who have been made ill by antimicrobial-resistant bacteria — enhanced job security)

 

(d) the ancillary industries that supply each of these groups

 

(money’s always good, right?)

 

Who does not benefit from the FDA’s pre-election scheme?

 

The society that subsidizes these industries by making the people that comprise “the public” ill.

 

 

The moral? — A society that externalizes the actual costs of production eventually pays an arguably moral price for its sins of greed

 

Permitting the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture creates a major health problem that is conceptually identical to those caused by refusing to impose the costs of pollution on polluters.

 

Our exclusively money-oriented culture has evolved into one in which we (i) reduce prices by (ii) ignoring their environmental costs (iii) in the hope that these health and environmental costs won’t fall on us, but (iv) will on our neighbor.

 

I’ll feed my cow antibiotics it doesn’t need.  You’ll indirectly benefit by getting slightly lower meat prices.  But one of us will eventually get sick, due to the drug-resistant bacteria we’re breeding in the process.  Hopefully, that will be “you” and not me.

 

That’s unregulated capitalism literally feeding on the people it kills or wounds.  An ethically attractive social system, huh?