Opinion: Curb antibiotic use in all meat

Three poultry industry giants recently announced plans to curb the practice of feeding antibiotics to healthy chickens and eliminate some drugs altogether. That is good news, but their counterparts in the meat and dairy business have been even slower to respond to public and scientific opinion. Beef and dairy farmers should heed doctors' persistent warnings that overuse of antibiotics in animals contributes to the growing problem of human drug resistance. And the federal government should develop a plan to keep all farmers honest on this important public health issue.

Right now, the only farmers required to report antibiotic use are those who seek the organic label for their products. That choice is strictly voluntary, and use by nonorganic growers is sporadically monitored, if at all. It took pressure from large fast-food chains such as McDonald's, Popeye's and Wendy's to persuade chicken farmers to change.

Some farmers use antibiotics to fatten animals in the belief that it makes animals grow faster. Still others try to use antibiotics to protect cows and chickens against persistent diseases. Problems arise when animals treated with antibiotics become breeding grounds for bacteria that are resistant to those medicines. When humans or other animals get infected with these super bugs, the drugs or dosages that once fought infections may no longer work. Antibiotic overuse poses huge risks to our ability to combat disease in human and animal populations. Yet profit pressures continue to motivate beef and dairy farmers to cling to the old ways.

Even that may soon change. Federal regulators should see that it does. For the last three years, the European Union has tightly regulated animal antibiotic use when the drugs are similar to those used in human medicine. Answering consumer demand abroad, they have also placed limits on meat imports that do not meet the new standards. If American farmers want to compete effectively in the European market, they will have to give up indiscriminate antibiotic use.

The trend away from wide antibiotic use in poultry should show the meat and dairy industries that it can be done. When it comes to medicines in food animals, the thinking should be that less is more beneficial for all concerned.

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