Antibiotics & food“Zero not an option”: Antibiotic use in agriculture

Published 5 March 2018

In November 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) took a significant step in its campaign to address the crisis of antibiotic resistance, calling for an overall reduction in the use of medically important antibiotics in food-producing animals. The WHO recommendations included a complete restriction on the use of medically important antibiotics for growth promotion in animals, a step that has already been taken by several countries and is not considered particularly controversial. Although the use of antibiotics for growth promotion has long been a practice in animal agriculture, it has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, both from the scientific community and the wider public. But the WHO also recommended that farmers stop using medically important antibiotics for preventing diseases that have not been clinically diagnosed — and that, one expert says, is where things start to get a little tricky.

In November 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) took a significant step in its campaign to address the crisis of antibiotic resistance, calling for an overall reduction in the use of medically important antibiotics in food-producing animals.

The WHO recommendations included a complete restriction on the use of medically important antibiotics for growth promotion in animals, a step that has already been taken by several countries and is not considered particularly controversial. Although the use of antibiotics for growth promotion has long been a practice in animal agriculture, it has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, both from the scientific community and the wider public.

But the WHO also recommended that farmers stop using medically important antibiotics for preventing diseases that have not been clinically diagnosed. And that, says Morgan Scott, where things start to get a little tricky.

“This poses problems to individuals who believe that prevention is a legitimate and ethical practice,” Scott, a professor of epidemiology in the department of veterinary pathology at Texas A&M University, told an audience Wednesday at the University of Minnesota.

CIDRAP notes that Scott, who spoke about the use, misuse, and overuse of antibiotics in agriculture and food production, was the second speaker in a series of lectures on antibiotic resistance hosted by the University of Minnesota’s Consortium on Law and Values in Health, Environment, and the Life Sciences. While Scott was not necessarily arguing in defense of the use of antibiotics for disease prevention in animals, his message was that, for the veterinarians tasked with keeping animals healthy, determining judicious use and non-judicious use of antibiotics is a complex decision that involves an array of factors.

“I tend to think it’s not that simple,” Scott said.

Differing views on judicious use
The use of medically important antibiotics for disease prevention in food animals is a controversial topic. Some believe that administering sub-therapeutic doses of antibiotics in healthy animals through feed and water can help promote antibiotic resistance by creating selection pressure for drug-resistant strains of bacteria. But defenders of the practice, including the US Department of Agriculture and the American Veterinary Medical Association, argue that using antibiotics for disease prevention