Opinion: The overuse of antibiotics

The American Medical Association recently sounded an alarm everyone should take seriously: The overuse of antibiotics, mostly by livestock producers, is creating strains of drug-resistant bacteria that pose an increasingly serious threat to the nation's health -- and to physicians' ability to combat common infections. For years, medical researchers have reported seeing strains of infectious bacteria that are resistant to common antibiotics. Several studies have drawn connections between antibiotics fed to animals and the movement through the food chain of drug-resistant infectious diseases.

The Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that a full 70 percent of all antibiotics in the United States are used in healthy farm animals. Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health plans to launch a four-year, $2-million campaign to educate patients on the misuse of antibiotics, in hopes of discouraging them from pressuring physicians for the drugs.

Because bacteria regenerate so rapidly within animals, it is easy for them to build up resistance over several generations to drugs in an animal's system. Humans are no exception. So when bacteria such as salmonella, commonly found in meat, eggs and poultry, infect a new animal or person, antibiotics that would normally cure the problem lose their effectiveness. The danger of generating a drug-resistant strain of bacteria is especially acute in populations where infections can spread rapidly, such as factory farms, hospitals and schools.

The AMA wants to ban the "non-therapeutic" use of antibiotics in healthy animals, especially for those drugs currently or potentially important to human medicine. They are not asking farmers to stop treating sick animals. But it is to everyone's advantage to curtail the unnecessary use of antibiotics in healthy ones -- especially because livestock populations are as susceptible to superbacteria as humans.

Regulators at the Food and Drug Administration have a chance to build on the initial step they took last year to stop two drugmakers from selling for use in poultry antibiotics that are used to treat intestinal infections in people. U.S. Rep. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, has sponsored a bill that would let the FDA, NIH and Centers for Disease Control identify the human drugs most vulnerable to developing resistance because of overuse in animals. Passage of Brown's measure might embolden FDA regulators to take the threat more seriously.

The AMA cited a recent study in Denmark that, it said, found "compelling evidence that restricting antibiotic use in agriculture can reverse the rise of resistant bacteria in farm animals."

Members of Congress wary of offending the farm lobby can point to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report showing hog farmers actually lost $45.5-million in 1999 by dosing pigs with growth-inducing antibiotics. Even though the pigs got fatter, those extra pounds only flooded the market with pork products and depressed prices, making profits leaner.

Since their introduction in the 1940s, antibiotics have been the essential weapon in battling tuberculosis, syphilis, typhoid, cholera and other deadly infectious diseases. It would be a tragedy to see the drugs' effectiveness negated by people too impatient to let the flu run its course or farmers too eager to produce a fatter pig. Convenience and profit are not worth a return to the dark ages.

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