Dive Brief:
- This week's report from the CDC on resistance to antibiotics was frightening. In brief, it said that infections are getting stronger and antibiotic medicine is growing less effective.
- The culprit? Overexposure to antibiotics through overmedication and the consumption of animal products.
- The CDC is tracking 16 drug-resistant organisms that it considers "alarming." Of those, four are foodborne infections that grow stronger and drug-resistant as animals grow.
- The CDC is pretty clear about what it wants to happen. It's calling for an end to the use of antibiotics to promote the growth of food-producing animals."Because of the link between antibiotic use in food-producing animals and the occurrence of antibiotic-resistant infections in humans, antibiotics should be used in food-producing animals only under veterinary oversight and only to manage and treat infectious diseases, not to promote growth."
Dive Insight:
Seemingly every health organization on earth has chimed in now to voice support for the CDC and to urge legislative action. We'd like to think somehow, someone, somewhere in Washington can come up with a solution. But we're not hopeful. There's a good possibility that hospitals and doctors can now be convinced to prescribe antibiotics less frequently for their human patients. But we expect the mainstream animal-agriculture lobby to resist the CDC. The big winner in all this, if there can be such a thing, will be producers who shun antibiotics and can market that fact effectively.