FDA Caves in to Lobbyists on Antibiotics, Putting Public Health at Risk

Maybe it all goes back to high school science. Maybe the reason I’m sitting here, writing, with urgency about the importance of sustainability, is because over the past fifty to a hundred years, businesses, with a few notable exceptions, have spent too much time concentrating on Physics and Chemistry and not enough time on Biology (not to mention Earth Science).

It is Biology, after all, that comprehends the web of connectedness that forms an ecosystem, the fundamental unit of our natural world. And it is our lack of attention to this web that has gotten us into so much trouble. Yet we have been running our world based largely on the laws of Physics and Chemistry, ignoring the laws of Biology at our peril. Today’s story is a prime example.

The FDA is putting the brakes on plans to regulate the consumption of antibiotics by healthy livestock raised for human consumption. The news was conveniently announced during the low news period between Christmas and New Years, despite the fact that the agency has been stalling on their decision since October. They gave no reason for its action, stating only that it intends to “focus its efforts for now on the potential for voluntary reform and the promotion of the judicious use of antimicrobials in the interest of public health.”

Scientists have understood the dangers of antibiotic resistance, also known as anti-microbial resistance (AMR), for quite some time. In fact, 70,000 people die in this country, every year, from infections such as MRSA that they acquire in the hospital from bugs that are resistant to drugs. Worldwide, more than twice that many people die each year from multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDRTB), alone.

The World Health Organization (WHO) claims that the proliferation of AMR threatens a return to the pre-antibiotic era, rolling back decades of medical progress in public health, as diseases that that once been under control once again become uncontrollable.

FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, released an animation which clearly states: “Not only do antimicrobial-resistant bacterial pathogens in animals pose a risk in terms of animal health, they also affect public health when transmitted to humans as foodbourne contaminants.  Thus addressing the issue of antimicrobial resistance is one of the most urgent priorities in the fields of public health today.”

If just a few bacteria are able to survive in a human or animal that has been treated with antibiotics, those organisms can then thrive in an environment where they will have little competition for food and will rapidly reproduce.

The Centers for Disease Control CDC warns people to only use antibiotics when they can be beneficial, and not against viruses or other non-bacterial pathogens. “Exposure to antibiotics,” they say, “provides selective pressure, which makes the surviving bacteria more likely to be resistant.” This means that the use of antibiotics is a double-edged sword, and their use should be minimized as much as possible.

And yet, despite this admonition, the US now consumes over 50 million pounds of antibiotics per year, an alarmingly high number considering the significant potential for harm. But what is even more alarming is the fact the somewhere between 60-80 percent of that is given to farm animals who aren’t even sick. This flies in the face of everything that agencies like WHO, FDA, and CDC have been trying to tell us for decades.

Back in August, I wrote about a number of doctors who had come forward to express their concern about antibiotic overexposure. In fact, Physicians For Social Responsibility, along with the American Medical Association and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, have been pushing for a piece of legislation called the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, which keeps getting buried in Congress under heavy pressure from lobbyists representing both the pharmaceutical companies and the meat packing industry.

These medical groups later took out large ads in Politico and The Hill, which stated, "Hundreds of scientific studies conducted over four decades have shown that feeding low doses of antibiotics to healthy food animals leads to drug-resistant infections in people," they wrote in the ad. "In fact, America's leading medical, scientific and public health organizations have been warning of the danger for years."

This immense public pressure on both sides of the issue is one reason why the FDA wanted to get minimal press for their announcement to move toward voluntary adoption.

Avinash Kar, an attorney for NRDC, said that he believed that the move was in response to a lawsuit his organization filed against the FDA that would require them to withdraw approval of the dangerous practice of adding antibiotics to the feed of healthy animals. Kar said that voluntary regulation has not worked in the past. Indeed the use of antibiotics is clearly on the rise.

Stephen Roach, of the Food Animals Concern Trust, who is also involved in the lawsuit against the FDA, made the following comment about the FDA’s latest move.“It is totally at odds with their mission to protect the public. This month we had a salmonella outbreak in the north-east that was resistant to penicillin and the drug that replaced penicillin, cephalosporin. We are going to continue to have multi-drug resistant salmonella outbreaks and E.coli drug-resistant outbreaks.”

All of this has me wondering if it is indeed Physics and Chemistry that companies are focusing on, or perhaps it is more likely Political Science and Economics.

Clearly, we have not heard the end of this. People need to become informed and let their representatives know if they are willing to let their health and safety be compromised in order for a small number of companies to increase their profits.

[Image credit/maraker/Flickr Creative Commons]

RP Siegel, PE, is the President of Rain Mountain LLC. He is also the co-author of the eco-thriller Vapor Trails, the first in a series covering the human side of various sustainability issues including energy, food, and water.  Like airplanes, we all leave behind a vapor trail. And though we can easily see others’, we rarely see our own.

Follow RP Siegel on Twitter.