Safeguard antibiotics: Curtailing unnecessary use in animals

 

Eighty percent of all U.S. antibiotics – 29 million lbs. per year – are given not to humans but to food animals, 90 percent of them are put into animal feed or water, typically not to treat sick animals but to promote growth or to offset the propensity of animals raised indoors or under close confinement to get sick.
Keep Antibiotics Working summary of the science shows: Experts agree this huge overuse of antibiotics in industrialized livestock and poultry is undercutting the future ability of antibiotics to effectively sick people. Or sick pets, for that matter. Multidrug resistant E coli causing hard-to-treat UTIs infections likely come from eating contaminated chicken. Increasingly, MRSA infections in people appear associated with livestock and farm environments.