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Finally there's a war on drugs I can support: the fight to get non-therapeutic antibiotics OUT of livestock feed. Hallelujah!
Following Nicholas Kristof's fantastic op ed Pathogens in our Pork, today Louise Slaughter and Ted Kennedy each introduced bills into the House and Senate, respectively, that would ban 7 classes of antibiotics from nontherapeutic use in livestock.
There are a few reasons why these bills are so good. First, the problem of antibiotic resistance is reversible. It's not "too late" and stopping the practice of nontherapeutic antibiotic use (i.e. giving drugs to animals who aren't sick for disease prevention or growth promotion) WILL make a difference. Second, it's important to not only ban drugs used in human medicine from nontherapeutic use in livestock but entire drug classes as the bill does. This is because a bug that evolves resistance to a drug can easily become resistant to other drugs in the same drug class. In other words, Slaughter and Kennedy really got it right when they wrote this bill.
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