Coalition Sues FDA Over Antibiotics Used in Factory Farming
Via the National Resources Defense Council:
The lawsuit filed today by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), Food Animal Concerns Trust (FACT), Public Citizen, and Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) was spurred by growing evidence that the spread of bacteria immune to antibiotics around the world has clear links to the overuse of antibiotics in the food industry. The coalition suit would compel FDA to take action on the agency’s own safety findings, withdrawing approval for most non-therapeutic uses of penicillin and tetracyclines in animal feed.
The suit would also compel the agency to respond to the citizen petitions filed by several of the plaintiffs in 1999 and 2005, to which FDA has never issued a final response, despite regulations requiring it to do so. The petitions requested that FDA take action to limit the use of antibiotics important to human medicine, such as those that doctors rely on to treat ailments like pneumonia, strep throat, childhood ear infections and more serious conditions. The lawsuit filed today would not affect the use of antibiotics to treat sick animals.
“We’ve been fighting the non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock for more than 30 years,” said Margaret Mellon, senior scientist and director of the Food and Environment Program at UCS. “And over those decades the problem has steadily worsened. We hope this lawsuit will finally compel the FDA to act with an urgency commensurate with magnitude of the problem.”
…“Antibiotics are vital lifesaving drugs that have the unique ability to kill bacteria without harming the patient,” said Richard Wood, FACT executive director. “When they work they truly are miracle drugs but when they fail the results can be catastrophic. Reducing antibiotic overuse is essential for making sure antibiotics will keep working for years to come. We can’t let these precious medicines be wasted so we can save — literally — a few pennies per pig.”
This is something I can get 100% behind… it’s loooong overdue.
June 8, 2011
I agree. Hopefully this will get them off their a** and get something done about it.
June 9, 2011
I hope so. I’ve done a fair bit of microbiology, so this worries me more than it otherwise might. But there are hurdles to overcome: expect significant pushback from the livestock industry… for example: http://nationalhogfarmer.com/health-diseases/lawsuit-ban-antibiotics-lacks-factual-basis-0526/
June 9, 2011
You knew they would’nt go away without a fight. From the looks of the article you linked, it’s like their expert against our expert kinda thing.
I will be very interested in the outcome.