The miracle drugs of the 20th century are under threat. Doctors are frustrated by rising numbers of illnesses resistant to their arsenal of antibiotics. When these medicines don't work, patients suffer or even die, and our nation's health tab ratchets upward.
Drugs such as penicillin and tetracycline, used routinely to treat respiratory disease and heart infections in humans, are also fed routinely to farm animals - not to treat diagnosed disease but to promote growth and to compensate for the overcrowded, stressful, unsanitary conditions on factory farms.
This reckless use in animals of tried-and-true human antibiotics has contributed to the development of serious antibiotic-resistant human disease. For example, scientists have long linked excessive antibiotic use in animals with a greater prevalence of resistant forms of food-borne infections - such as those caused by salmonella bacteria - and systemic blood infections.
Recent studies now suggest that antibiotic use in livestock operations may also be driving the emergence of a new type of community-acquired (or CA) superbug, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). CA-MRSA causes serious, sometime deadly, resistant infections among healthy individuals - tragically including many high school students and athletes.
Researchers recently found CA-MRSA in 70 percent of pigs tested on Iowa and Illinois hog farms. More alarming, they found the identical staph strain in about 40 percent of people who work on the farms, suggesting transmission of the strain from pigs to farmworkers and perhaps to the wider community.
The most straightforward way to address resistant diseases such as CA-MRSA is to curb the unnecessary use of all antibiotics important to human medicine in U.S. livestock operations, including penicillin and tetracycline. While Congress has begun to hear this call to action, it has not yet seriously addressed the crisis. Instead, Congress has set its sights on reauthorizing the Animal Drug User Fee Act, a bill that distorts the Food and Drug Administration's priorities to favor faster approvals for animal drugs. The FDA genuinely needs more funding to do its job in an increasingly complex world. But reliance on user fees is a dangerous way to get that funding. User fees set up a scheme where the FDA becomes dependent on the very industries it regulates.
