After years of warnings that carelessly feeding antibiotics to farm animals would create drug-resistant superbugs, the federal government finally wants to crack down. The farm industry, however, has other plans. Under the proposed Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act, or PAMTA, newly-developed antibiotics couldn’t be given to farm animals unless they were sick. The casual use of already-established drugs would be restricted.

For people, that’s simple common sense. Doctors don’t hand out antibiotics as preventive measures, to be popped like vitamin C, because that would accelerate the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Having a few tough bugs survive in a patient who needed the drug is an inevitable downside, but cultivating those bugs in millions of already-healthy people is foolish. But that’s not how it works on industrial U.S. farms, where antibiotics are routinely added to animal feed in order to encourage growth and prevent infections exacerbated by overcrowding and stress. About 70 percent of all antibiotics used in the United States are given to healthy farm animals.

That’s turned U.S. farms into disease incubators for things like MRSA ST398, a new strain of drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. Other types of drug-resistant staph infections already kill 18,000 Americans every year. The new strain, which appears to have evolved on Dutch farms and is spreading through U.S. pigs and into people, will only add to the toll.

Last year, the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production concluded that “the present system of producing food animals in the United States is not sustainable and presents an unacceptable level of risk to public health.” Five of their 24 recommendations — including the top two — involved antibiotic use in farm animals. The Pew Commission was composed of national experts, not marginal activists. Other advocates of cutting back on farm antibiotics include the World Health Association, American Medical Association, American Public Health Association and the American Association of Pediatrics.

The Obama administration is taking their advice. On July 13, a Food and Drug Administration official testified in support of PAMTA at a Congressional committee. According to FeedStuffs Foodlink, a farm industry-supported news site, that support was vetted by the White House. In the same article, the consensus that exists among public health experts is described as “years of debate on the risk” of emerging drug resistance, and the agriculture industry was left “nearly speechless with surprise.” The latter might be true, given the reluctance of past administrations to confront the issue. But surprised or not, as the New York Times reported of PAMTA last Monday, “the farm lobby’s opposition makes its passage unlikely.” If they win, the farm lobby will have proved itself more powerful than the public interest.

(Wired, 21/06/2009)