A Lot Can be Done to Stop the Overuse of Antibiotics in the Meat Industry
37 Organizations, Medical Professionals, and Consumers Call on the HHS Secretary to do it
For many problems, it is difficult to know how to stop them. The spread of antibiotic-resistant superbugs is not one of them. The evidence is overwhelming: to stop superbugs, we need to stop overusing antibiotics. That is why 37 organizations, along with medical professionals and consumers, joined together to call on The Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert Kennedy Jr., to take four actions that are consistent with his job as Secretary to stop antibiotic overuse in the meat industry. FACT and allies asked him to:
Prohibit the use of medically important antibiotics in the feed and water of food animals for disease prevention in the absence of diagnosed illness.
Set national targets to curtail antibiotic use.
Replace continuous use of antibiotics in food animals with durations of use sufficiently short to not create a resistance problem.
Track actual antibiotic use by collecting data on antibiotics mixed into feed that is sent to animal raising facilities.
Each of these actions is within the Secretary’s power under existing laws and regulations. The meat industry and animal drug industries that profit from the overuse of antibiotics will not like the actions, which is part of the reason previous administrations have not taken this step to protect public health. But these actions are critical for protecting public health and preserving our antibiotics for the future.
Effective antibiotics are essential for surgery, chemotherapy, organ transplantation, and the care of premature infants. More than 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, and more than 35,000 people die as a result. Antibiotic overuse, whether in human medicine or animal agriculture, is the major driver of antibiotic resistance, but roughly two-thirds of all medically important antibiotics sold in the U.S. are given to food animals, not used to treat sick people. Sales for human medicine have steadily declined in recent years. And yet sales of these same antibiotics for animal use rose more than 10% from 2017 to 2023, driven in large part by a 33% rise in sales for use in pigs. Over the same period, the chicken industry has continued to reduce its already low use, indicating that a large, profitable meat industry is compatible with not overusing antibiotics. The pork and beef industries will need to make some changes, particularly cleaning up, increasing space, improving diets, and leaving baby animals longer with their mothers. These changes will not only improve animal welfare and animal health but also decrease the use of antibiotics.
You can read the letter we sent to the HHS Secretary here. We also want to thank all of you who have signed our petition, all the organizations that signed our letter, and the medical professionals who signed as well. Once we have a response from the Secretary, we will be sure to provide an update here and on our socials.