That is arguably the best the US can do, especially with the pro-business Trump administration coming to power. But the researchers knew in advance that a growth promoter ban would not be enough. They had an example of why it didn’t work: A few years earlier, the Dutch government noticed that despite an EU ban in 2006, antibiotic sales to farms The Netherlands is still rising. An investigation by academics working with regulatory authorities found that companies selling agricultural antibiotics in the Netherlands were changed the label on growth-promoting factors for “precautionary use” to circumvent the new law.
That seems to be what happened in America. One means of using antibiotics is considered illegal, so manufacturers have found another route. Lance Price, a microbiologist and professor at the Milken School of Public Health at George Washington University and founding director of the George Washington University Antibiotic Resistance Action Center said: “It’s a perfect parallel to what happened in the Netherlands, where they just changed what they call it.”
New federal data has a bright spot. The 2020 report revealed that of all the antibiotics sold for agricultural purposes, raising chickens – the most commonly consumed meat in the US – accounts for only 2% of the drugs. This compares with 41% for cattle and pigs and 12% for turkeys. It represents a complete rotation for the U.S. chicken industry, beginning in 2014, when Perdue Foods, then the nation’s fourth-largest producer, announced that it take its full activity Does not contain antibiotics.
“Only 1% of broiler chickens in the US are produced with what the industry calls ‘full-spectrum antibiotics,'” Wellington said. “And more than half stated ‘Never have antibiotics.’ That’s incredible. But it means we are at an impasse with pig and cattle farming.”
In 2018, a year after the growth promotion ban went into effect, the FDA announced that it would be launching a 5-year plan to further regulate farm antibiotics. But progress is very slow. In June, the agency introduced new rules that would reclassify the remaining over-the-counter drugs — a small number of injectable and topical antibiotics — as prescription only.
Activists are impatient for the agency to do more. One open letter from researchers announced earlier this year, asking the Biden administration to take sweeping actions, has not sparked any response. So advocates are focusing on the smaller changes they feel make sense for the FDA to make: more regulation, especially on How long can antibiotics be used? in any single animal or herd, and more data collection will allow for a better understanding of how antibiotics are being misused. The annual report that tracks drug resistance rates in bacteria from humans and animals, and matches it with both sales and use data, is routine in the EU. In the US, no such comprehensive report exists.
“First, if the FDA actually did what it suggested in 2017, we would know more — that is, instead of just reporting sales, reporting sales with a denominator that reflects the size of the animal population,” said David Wallinga, a physician and senior official at the NRDC and co-author of the FDA data analysis. “That’s what they’ve been doing in Europe since 2010. And the second thing is really collecting data at the farm level on antibiotic use.”
