Strong Leadership From HHS is Needed to Preserve our Antibiotics and Protect Public Health
Today, Food Animal Concerns Trust and 24 colleagues and ally organizations on behalf of the Keep Antibiotics Working Coalition sent a letter to the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Xavier Becerra, urging his immediate action in addressing the antibiotic resistance crisis.
This crisis causes approximately 1.27 million deaths globally each year and kills someone in the United States every 15 minutes. Despite these staggering numbers, and the ongoing spread of deadly antibiotic resistant superbugs - dangerous sometimes fatal infections that no longer respond to the antibiotics previously used to treat them - the U.S. response has fallen short on curbing its chief driver – widespread and avoidable overuse of these precious medicines. While antibiotic overuse exists in the human health sector, unmitigated and blatant overuse of antibiotics is occurring in industrial animal agriculture, where poor animal welfare practices are commonplace and antibiotics are used to bolster producer profits versus support for animal health and well-being. With U.S. sales of medically important antibiotics in animals nearly double the sales for human medicine, it is clear where major efforts to preserve antibiotics must be directed. Stopping the exorbitant overuse of antibiotics in industrial animal agriculture is key to keeping animals, and in turn humans, healthy.
Among the top six resistant organisms causing the most antibiotic resistant deaths worldwide, resistant Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus have been clearly linked to food animals. In fact, a recent study published by researchers at the George Washington University Milken Institute of Public Health estimated that between 480,000 and 640,000 urinary tract infections in the United States each year may be caused by foodborne E. coli strains.
To protect the public against the spread of resistant infections, the U.S. needs a public commitment from Secretary Becerra and the federal government for the following:
Set national targets for reducing antibiotic use in both human medicine and food animals, along with timelines for reaching those targets.
Direct the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to robustly collect and analyze antibiotic use information from feed mills in order to observe where overuse is occurring and implement strategies to curb that overuse. Feed mill data is already available to the FDA under existing regulations but they do not currently collect it.
Ensure all federal antibiotic sales and use information is coordinated between agencies and readily available to the public in a comprehensive, accessible manner.
State-based policies in Maryland and California to reduce antibiotic overuse, while a step in the right direction, still lack the federal and FDA backing to elicit real change in the antibiotic resistance crisis. As stated by UC Berkeley Public Health researcher, Jay Graham, and his colleagues in their recently published study, state policies have vague language on antimicrobial use, lack producer accountability and reporting and don’t have the necessary funding for data analysis and enforcement. Thus Federal policies with interagency coordination and backing from the Department of Health and Human Services are needed to nationally survey how antibiotics are being used in industrial farming and restrict antibiotic overuse. Without rapid action on behalf of the federal government, more people will continue to die from resistant infections and that number will only grow.
See the letter sent on behalf of 25 organizations here. You can also view the individual stakeholder letter sent by our ally, US PIRG on behalf of 52 medical professionals requesting the Secretary implement the aforementioned efforts to combat antibiotic resistance and protect public health.