McDonald’s USA president Mike Andres made the announcement on Monday, way ahead of the scheduled 2017 date for the shift to be completed, according to Reuters.
The announcement is a big deal for the fast food company that announced in March 2015 they would gradually stop buying chickens raised with human antibiotics, the most aggressive step taken by a major food company in changing the practices of chicken producers.
At the time, McDonald’s said the shift would be completed by 2017. “We’re listening to our customers,” Marion Gross, senior vice president of McDonald’s North American supply chain told Reuters.
The fast food restaurant expressed the concern that the overuse of human antibiotics in poultry could diminish their effectiveness in treating diseases in humans. And while veterinary use of antibiotics is legal, there has been growing concern over the blatant misuse of these important medications.
In the past several years, there has been an increase in the number of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, and the alarm has been raised worldwide. In the U.S. alone, 23,000 people lose their lives annually from infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Besides many doctors prescribing antibiotics when they are not necessary, producers of animals for human consumption also use antibiotics indiscriminately, quite often to enhance the animal’s growth, and not because of sickness. So McDonald’s should be lauded for its efforts in stopping the use of human antibiotics in its chicken products.
