WASHINGTON, May 11, 2016 - Are farmers and ranchers doing
enough to curb unnecessary antibiotic use in their operations? Two expert
panelists who spoke at last Thursday’s Animal Agriculture Alliance
meeting said yes – and encouraged attendees to get the word out.
Leah Dorman, a veterinarian and director of food
integrity and consumer engagement for Phibro Animal Health, said producers
should celebrate the guidance the FDA has provided in recent years, calling for
the voluntary elimination of antibiotics used for growth
promotion and for the veterinary
oversight of antibiotics administered in feed or water by 2017.
“We’re making some changes, folks, and we have a golden
opportunity in the next seven months to talk about this,” she said. “We’re
doing our part in animal agriculture to ensure that we’re using antibiotics
responsibly and that’s a very important message to get out to consumers.”
Limiting the use of antibiotics in animal production is
possible, and “there are companies out there that do a wonderful job of raising
animals without antibiotics,” Dorman said, but that can involve some tough
business decisions and can lead to “unintended consequences,” including
suffering among animals and food-safety issues.
Richard Raymond, a public health consultant and former
USDA under secretary for food safety during the George W. Bush administration,
is of the same opinion – that antibiotics are an essential tool in raising
healthy animals for safe food.
Raymond pointed to a report from the World Health
Organization on antibiotic resistance, released
in 2014, which says that food-producing animals harbor pathogens that can
transfer to humans (the most common transferable bacteria are Salmonella,
Campylobacter, E. coli and Enterococcus), that those pathogens can have adverse
effects on food production, and that antibiotic resistance in animals can
spread to humans. However, WHO acknowledges in the report that it doesn’t know
how resistance is transmitted through the food chain to humans, or what impact
that transmission has on the effectiveness of human antibiotics.
“We don’t know how much interaction there is between
animal health and human health,” Raymond said. “All we know is that there’s
very little crossover between antibiotics used in both animals and humans.”
Raymond said that according to his interpretation of 2014
FDA data on antibiotics sales in the U.S., less than 20 percent of the
antibiotics approved for use in food-producing animals are used in human
medicine.
“We are moving in the right direction… but no one seems
to know that or say that,” he said. “The FDA is responsible for (tracking
antibiotic use) and they’re doing a pretty darn good job.”
Many in the world of antibiotic resistance research and
policy would disagree with Raymond, perhaps most notably a White House panel –
the Presidential
Advisory Council on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria (PACCARB) –
which recently gave its evaluation on how well the federal government is
managing to fight resistance.
One of PACCARB’s recommendations was for USDA to monitor
how and how much antibiotics were being used in food-producing animals.
“Collecting on-farm antibiotic data is of critical
importance,” the panel said in its report, and “lack of federal funding is
hindering on-farm work and constrains implementation of the NAP (National
Action Plan on Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria).”
Raymond said he was “not really excited” about on-farm
monitoring because he didn’t think “it will really help much.”
“Who is going to go through all that paperwork” from the
farms?, he asked. How much would it all cost? Raymond suggested that because
the link between antibiotic resistance in human antibiotics and animal
antibiotics isn’t fully understood, it wouldn’t make sense to make the animal
industry “do all that paperwork.”
Some of the biggest players in agriculture – the American
Farm Bureau Federation and the National Pork Producers Council – have been wary
of on-farm monitoring, citing data security and confidentiality concerns.
Raymond did say, however, that it would be helpful to
have more complete data on antibiotic use – how much is administered to
food-producing animals versus companion animals, how the drugs are administered
and for what purpose (treatment, control or prevention) – as opposed to just
FDA sales data. And he praised the FDA’s guidance as “good policy.”
Yesterday, FDA released a final rule that requires drug
sponsors of antibiotics used in food-producing animals to report how much they
sell for the use in specific species, such as cattle, swine, chickens or
turkeys. “Adding the requirement for sponsors to report species-specific sales
estimates will complement the data collection plan we are developing to obtain
additional on-farm use and resistance data,” FDA said in a
release. “The collection of data from multiple sources… is needed to
provide a comprehensive and science-based picture of antimicrobial drug use and
resistance in animal agriculture.”
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