"On New Year's Eve 2009, Jacquie Allen, 42, was told by doctors that her son Brody might not live through the night. What started a few days earlier as a strange pimple on his knee had morphed into a full-blown attack on the 12-year-old's body. "One day he was perfectly healthy and the next he was in septic shock," says Jacquie, who lives in Southern California with her husband and their five children. "He became completely swollen and jaundiced, and his organs were failing. They tested him for everything, but no one could figure out what was wrong. I felt like I was on an episode of House." Finally, doctors determined that Brody had methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. It's a type of staph (a bacteria many of us have on our skin) that has become resistant to most antibiotics and can cause infections that are hard to diagnose, tricky to treat, and sometimes fatal. The infection quickly spread to Brody's joints. "They pumped him full of antibiotic after antibiotic, but nothing was working," Jacquie says. Eventually, Brody's elbow became so inflamed that the only option was risky surgery. "The surgeon came in and said, 'Your son is going to die if we don't get that infection out now.'"
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Americans take antibiotics carelessly, prophylactically, almost recreationally, and our overuse is creating superbugs that no drug will be able to kill.
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Consumers aren't the only problem: Another major contributing factor in this crisis is the overuse of antibiotics in the farming industry, Mellon says. It's standard practice to feed low doses of antibiotics to chickens, pigs, and cows to make them grow faster and keep them from getting sick in crowded conditions. The United States Food and Drug Administration is finally starting to tackle agricultural use of antibiotics, but the rest is in our hands, and our doctors'. Preserving the effectiveness of antibiotics is "a huge public health issue," says Mellon, "and we need to start taking it more seriously right now."'
Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) today introduced the Preventing Antibiotic Resistance Act, a bipartisan bill that would eliminate certain antibiotic-related practices that contribute to the rise of drug-resistant bacteria and endanger human health. The legislation is co-sponsored by Senators Susan Collins (R-ME), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Jack Reed (D-RI), Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA).
More infoThis bibliography lists the latest published scientific and economic literature concerning the contribution of routine antibiotic use in food animals to the growing public health crisis of human antibiotic resistance. Research on how antibiotic use in food animal production contributes to the growing health crisis of antibiotic resistance dates back more than 30 years.
More infoPew Charitable Trusts today applauded Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and Susan Collins (R-ME), for introducing the Antimicrobial Data Collection Act, which would require the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, to report more information on the annual sales of antibiotics used among industrial farm animals. The bipartisan bill would also give the agency a deadline to finalize policies proposed last year to eliminate the use of antibiotics for growth promotion purposes in meat production.
More info"As a nation, we need to exercise greater care with our use of antibiotics, in both humans and animals, so that these medications remain effective in treating serious bacterial infections."
More infoSuperChefs Against Superbugs, an initiative of the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming, is a movement of chefs nationwide who have expressed their support of ending the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in food animal production. As a result, the SuperChefs are urging the Food and Drug Administration to strengthen its antibiotic policies.
More infoSuperChefs Against Superbugs, an initiative of the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming, is a movement of chefs who want to stop the overuse of antibiotics in food animal production. On April 23, the following seven chefs visited Capitol Hill to explain why they serve meat and poultry raised without antibiotics.
More infoIt used to be easy to treat healthy children with common bacterial infections; a regimen of antibiotic pills could usually wipe out the disease. Today, patients might need to go home on intravenous antibiotics because oral therapies will no longer work. Antibiotic resistance is to blame.
More infoA past bout of salmonella led Maine resident Danielle Wadsworth to travel to Washington, D.C. this week to argue for stronger regulations to curtail the use of antibiotics in livestock farming. She took part Wednesday in "Supermoms Against Superbugs," an initiative of the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming.
More infoDr. Cecilia Di Pentima is in Washington, D.C., for “Supermoms against Superbugs” to push for laws to curtail the use of antibiotics in livestock farming — one of many fronts in the battle to preserve the effectiveness of the medicines. Family physicians in the South, including Tennessee, have also been identified as inadvertent purveyors of drug-resistant bacteria by prescribing too many antibiotics.
More infoEach year, tens of thousands of Americans die and hundreds of thousands are hospitalized because of bacterial infections resistant to antibiotics. Antibiotic overuse on industrial farms is a big part of the problem. The largest U.S. meat and poultry producers feed antibiotics to healthy animals over much of their lives to make them grow faster and to compensate for the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions in which they are bred and slaughtered.
More infoOn behalf of the undersigned organizations representing medical, public health, scientific, agricultural, environmental, animal protection, and other organizations, we urge you to include H.R. 820, the Delivering Antimicrobial Transparency in Animals (DATA) Act, as part of the final Animal Drug User Fee Act (ADUFA). This legislation provides a reasonable, common-sense approach to better understanding antibiotic use in agriculture.
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