The 2013 Summary Report contains information required under the Animal Drug User Fee Act (ADUFA), and reflects data from the year prior to the FDA’s announcement of the Guidance for Industry #213, that requested the judicious use of antimicrobials in the meat industry.
The agency’s Guidance for Industry #213 was a tepid request by the agency, asking animal drug sponsors to change the information on product labels, removing any indications of use related to growth promotion, and to bring the remaining therapeutic uses of these products under the oversight of a veterinarian by December 2016.
Since the 1950s, when farmers discovered that feeding antibiotics to animals helped to fatten them up for market, feedlots have turned into breeding grounds for drug-resistant bacteria or Super-bugs. In 2011, Over 30 million pounds of antibiotics were purchased by the livestock industry, almost four times what was used in humans in the U.S.
The numbers continue to grow
The FDA report issued on Friday shows that overall sales were up by 32.6 million pounds in 2013, with annual sales of medically important antibiotics rising by 20 percent between 2009 and 2013. In 2013 alone, 62 percent of the antibiotics, 20 million pounds, were important to human medicine.
What are these medically important antibiotics? The most widely used in meat production, Tetracyclines. We can add Penicillins, Sulfonamides, and Ionophores. In the agency’s 2013 report, they are only required to report on the volume of antibiotics sold and distributed, but no data is collected on the use of the drugs.
It is clearly obvious from the report that the FDA’s use of the “pretty please” approach to limiting antibiotic use by the meat industry is having only a limited effect. The data from the FDA is just more numbers that reflect on a growing public health crisis in the U.S., one the CDC dubs the “post-antibiotic era.”
According to the CDC, annually, two million people in the U.S. come down with antibiotic-resistant infections, and every year, about 23,000 of those cases prove to be fatal.
