Why Are Vets Against Antibiotics in Livestock Reform?

Here's my letter draft (4.00 / 2)

To Tammy, who's on the House Energy and Commerce committee where the bill was referred.

Dear Representative Baldwin,

Please support H.R. 1549, the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2009.  This amendment to the FFDCA is applicable to three areas that are very important to me and other Wisconsinites: agriculture, food safety, and health care.

Antibiotic resistance is already threatening the effectiveness of many life-saving drugs, because the widespread overuse of these drugs promotes and accelerates the evolution of drug-resistant bacteria.  Every day--while health care professionals struggle to educate their patients about the necessity of limiting the use of antibiotics--massive quantities of antibiotics are fed to every animal in many livestock operations, animals that aren't even sick!  Just think what doctors would say if a patient (or all their patients) were taking these antibiotics every day.  By making antibiotic use so pervasive in livestock operations, we are undercutting one of the most important medical innovations in human history and putting the health of every citizen at unnecessary risk.

This antibiotic use on healthy livestock is also a food safety issue.  Just two weeks ago, on August 6, there was a recall of a million pounds of ground beef tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella--organisms that evolved specifically in response to the pressure of omnipresent antibiotics in their cattle hosts' bodies.  (For details and links to the relevant research, see http://www.marlerblog.com/2009...  

Finally, the misuse of antibiotics in agriculture threatens the very livestock operations overusing them.  The more livestock are irresponsibly exposed to an excess of these drugs, the more animals will be afflicted by untreatable bacterial illnesses.  A drug-resistant infection would be devastating in the dense, already stressful conditions of a large livestock operation.  The risk of such a catastrophe will be much lower if the antibiotics are reserved for animals that are actually sick.

H.R. 1549 addresses these problems by putting an end non-therapeutic use of critical antibiotics in livestock, both by halting the approval of new drugs on healthy animals and phasing out the use of existing in that fashion.  Please help protect the effectiveness of critical antibiotics by supporting this legislation.

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by: xjm @ Tue Aug 18, 2009 at 21:20:32 PM UTC

I have an idea (4.00 / 3)

that the AVMA is against banning antibiotics in livestock and poultry because they know full well that without the antibiotics high density confined livestock and poultry production is not possible. They also have their head in the sand regarding the health risks that this type of antibiotic use poses to both human and animal health over the long term.

You know what happens when you stick your head in the sand - something comes along to kick your ass that's sticking up.

I remember when the feed-through wormers came on the market for horses. Just feed a scoop of this stuff to your horse with his/her grain every day and they'll be worm free. Gut worms are a serious problem with horses in confinement situations like boarding stables, where even though they may be turned out during the day, the stables usually don't have enough pasture to be able to rotate all the horses into different paddocks to break the parasites' cycles. If these parasites build up enough in a horse's gut they can cause an impaction collic which can easily kill a horse.

I once asked a vet at a recreational horsemanship clinic about feed through wormers and if they could cause chemical resistance in populations of various parasites. I was told unequivicoley that no this wasn't a problem and never would be a problem. I didn't agree with him, but hey, he was the vet.

Now what do we see in the horse magazines? Don't use the same wormer every time and don't use it too much. I still use Ivermectin to worm my horses, but I only use it twice a year. I keep the manure picked up and I usually drylot the horses on pasture for 4 months out of the year during winter. If I had my horses in a boarding situation, in addition to picking the stall and run daily, I would worm more often, although not once a month like a lot of people do, but I would also rotate wormers. We always did when I was younger and boarded the horses.

Anyway, getting back to the antibiotic issues, you can keep livestock in high density confinement without antibiotics, but the problem is that because the animals would need to be managed differently, and integrators would have to start breeding those animals more for disease resistance than for feed conversion, it would increase the expense of rearing those animals. The integrators don't want to pay more, and the vets work for the integrators and feed lots, not for us.

Just my two bits.

Regarding locavores as elitists - explain to me how supporting local business is elitist....

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by: Joanne Rigutto @ Tue Aug 18, 2009 at 21:32:09 PM UTC

fascinating Joanne, thanks! nt (4.00 / 1)

"I can understand someone from Iowa promoting corn and soy, but we are not feeding the world, we are feeding animals and soft drink companies." - Jim Goodman

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by: Jill Richardson @ Wed Aug 19, 2009 at 05:00:27 AM UTC

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