Charging that the Food and Drug Administration has long known the danger of putting antibiotics into animal feed, several environmental and health groups are suing the federal agency to force it to curb the practice.
The plaintiffs, according to the The Wall Street Journal, are specifically aiming for a ban on dosing healthy livestock with penicillin and tetracycline.
They accuse the FDA of failing to act despite learning years ago that large-scale doses of penicillin and tetracyclines in animal feed could create so-called superbugs that are resistant to drugs that humans rely on to fight infections.
“Approximately 80 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States today are used in livestock,” the groups said in the lawsuit. “Most of these drugs are not used to treat disease. Instead, they are given to healthy animals in their feed or water, both to promote faster growth and to prevent infections.”
Livestock raised in the U.S. consume about 28.6 million pounds of antibiotics, the FDA reported last year, and about 74 percent of the antibiotics are administered through feed.
Courtney Hamilton, a spokeswoman for the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the plaintiffs, told the Journal that it and the other advocacy groups don’t want to stop farmers from giving the antibiotics to sick animals, but to prevent low-level dosing in healthy animals.
The FDA said it would not comment on pending litigation. However, the FDA said in a document last year that it never followed through on a plan back in 1977 to ban the two antibiotics in feed because of opposition to the proposal. Critics have contended that the agency doesn’t have enough evidence “to show that drug-resistant bacteria of animal origin were commonly transmitted to humans and caused serious illness.”
Meanwhile, recent research has focused fresh attention on the potential hazards.
The National Pork Producers Council called the lawsuit “spurious” and the group’s president, Doug Wolf, said there is no evidence that human health is threatened by the use of antibiotics in livestock feed.
The Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Science in the Public Interest, Food Animal Concerns Trust, Public Citizen and the Union of Concerned Scientists filed their suit Wednesday with the U.S. District Court in New York.
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The pork industry defends horrendous cruelty to animals — factory farmers keep breeding pigs locked in two-foot-wide crates where the pigs can’t even turn around for nearly their entire lives. Eight states have passed laws against this type of animal abuse, yet groups like the National Pork Producers Council still support it.
More info at this link: http://www.humanesociety.org/news/press_releases/2010/12/smithfield_pigs_121510.html