Antibiotics are not the worst of it

Factory farming is bad enough all by itself. Animals lead short, brutal lives in hideously overcrowded and filthy conditions. It's all about the money. People want meat, preferably cheap. Farmers make more money the more animals they can rush to slaughter.

One of the ways they can do this is to routinely feed antibiotics to factory farmed animals, in an attempt to keep them "healthy" till slaughter. For many, many years, this practice has been criticized because of its eventual effect on humans (no not the animals -- of course).

Reproduced below, a New York Times editorial published on June 2 discusses this problem. Instead of ending the feeding of antibiotics to factory-farmed animals, the temptation is to say, "Stop factory farming!" But the far better thing to say is, "Stop eating meat!"

THE HIGH COST OF CHEAP MEAT

The point of factory farming is cheap meat, made possible by confining large numbers of animals in small spaces. Perhaps the greatest hidden cost is its potential effect on human health.

Small doses of antibiotics — too small to kill bacteria — are fed to factory farm animals as part of their regular diet to promote growth and offset the risks of overcrowding. What factory farms are really raising is antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which means that several classes of antibiotics no longer work the way they should in humans. We pay for cheap meat by sacrificing some of the most important drugs ever developed.

Last week, the Natural Resources Defense Council, joined by other advocacy groups, sued the Food and Drug Administration to compel it to end the nontherapeutic use of penicillin and tetracycline in farm animals. Veterinarians would still be able to treat sick animals with these drugs but could not routinely add the drugs to their diets.

For years, the F.D.A. has had the scientific studies and the authority to ban these drugs. But it has always bowed to pressure from the pharmaceutical and farm lobbies, despite the well-founded objections of groups like the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization, which support an antibiotic ban.

It is time for the F.D.A. to stop corporate factory farms from squandering valuable drugs just to promote growth among animals confined in conditions that inherently create the risk of disease. According to recent estimates, 70 percent of the antibiotics sold in this country end up in farm animals. The F.D.A. can change that by honoring its own scientific conclusions and its statutory obligation to end its approval of unsafe drug uses.

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