U.S. moves to address antibiotic resistant bacterial diseases

2010 at a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Rear Admiral Ali Kahn, assistant surgeon general and then acting deputy director for the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Disease, stated that “there is unequivocal evidence and relationship between [the] use of antibiotics in animals and [the] transmission of antibiotic-resistant bacteria causing adverse effects in humans.”

In 2009 more than ten million pounds of the antibiotic tetracycline were sold for animal use, more than the combined weight of all antibiotics produced for human consumption. Scientists are particularly concerned as tetracycline is a drug commonly used for humans and studies have shown that excessive use of tetracycline in animals, especially pigs, can lead to increased rates of bacterial resistance to that drug resulting in superbacteria like Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or drug resistant salmonella that are difficult to treat and can be fatal.

At the core of the rise of these antibiotic resistant strains of diseases is the industry standard of feeding animals low doses of antimicrobial drugs to promote growth. These doses are not enough to kill the bacteria, but instead result in a problem first identified by the inventor of penicillin, Alexander Fleming, who cautioned that “the greatest possibility of evil in self-medication is the use of too small doses so that instead of clearing up infection, the microbes are educated to resist penicillin.”

In a testimony before the Pennsylvania State legislature Dr. Ellen Silbergeld, professor of environmental health sciences at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, warned that, “bacteria respond to chemical structures, not brand names, and resistance to one member of a pharmaceutical class results in cross resistance to all other members of the same class.” The result is that when bacteria develop resistance to one set of antibiotics it can resist all.

Some infectious disease experts fear a post-antibiotic era, where simple bacterial infections could once again cause serious health problems or death. Therefore to ensure the efficacy of antibiotics and combat the rise of superbacteria, the federal government, state governments, and federal agencies have moved to curtail the excessive use of antibiotics and are now eyeing the practices of the meat producing industry.

In its report titled “The Judicious Use of Medically important Antimicrobial Drugs in Food-Producing Animals,” released last June, the FDA stated that “using medically important antimicrobial drugs as judiciously as possible is key to minimizing resistance development and preserving