CASTING PILLS BEFORE SWINE.(antibiotics in animal feed)(Brief Article)

Recently the journal of the American Medical Association reported that the number of cases of drug-resistant salmonella in the United States is on the rise. The article did not make the headlines for the simple reason that it is not news. Scientists have been saying for 20 years that the overuse of antibiotics is causing bacteria to develop resistance.

Last week the Union of Concerned Scientists published a report on the use of antibiotics in animal feed. Using available sources and some clever reasoning, scientists at the UCS found that American livestock producers use almost 25 million pounds of antibiotics a year for nontherapeutic purposes, mostly to help the animals grow bigger faster. That's 40 percent more than the industry says it uses. What's disturbing about this report is that it was new enough to make the headlines.

In two decades you might think that scientists would have gathered plenty of data to buttress their central claim: that the profligate use of antibiotics in animal feed is a public-health crisis in the making. But the drug companies in the United States and most other developed nations have been unwilling to release even basic information on animal-husbandry practices, such as the volume of antibiotics fed to cattle, pigs and chickens. They say that they fear revealing trade secrets, but I suspect the real reason is fear of how the public, already skittish about mad-cow disease, will react. For every ounce of antibiotics an American doctor prescribes for a patient, livestock producers feed more than eight ounces to animals.

At this point it's worth emphasizing a crucial distinction. The UCS figures do not include antibiotics given to animals that are sick. They include only those given to healthy animals, primarily to promote growth. Back in the 1950s the livestock industry, searching for cheap alternatives to grains, began putting waste from the pharmaceutical industry into animal feed. When they used byproducts from antibiotics production, their animals grew bigger. They didn't know why, but it seemed like a good thing, so the practice caught on.

America is not the only culprit. Europe feeds as much antibiotics to its animals as it does to its people, according to estimates. Virtually no data are available on the situation in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The World Health Organization's most recent figures about China date back to the 1970s. At that time China's livestock industry was on a par with the United States' in antibiotics use, and there's every reason to believe they've at least kept pace. We know things are bad, because when tourists from Europe and America travel to the developing world, they often bring back ordinary diseases with extraordinary resistance. When we see a resistant strain of salmonella, there's a 95 percent chance the patient caught it on vacation in Southeast Asia, Africa or southern Europe. In America the Centers for Disease Control and ...