Farm Animals Get 80 Percent of Antibiotics Sold in U.S.
Found on Wired on Sunday, 26 December 2010
The proportion of antibiotics sold in the United States each year that go to animals turns out to be not 70 percent, but rather 80 percent. Here's CLF's Ralph Loglisci, who got the confirmatory numbers from the FDA.
Most of the drugs used in animal agriculture and in human medicine are functionally identical. That's one reason why the overuse of antibiotics in animals is such a concern: When organisms become resistant on the farm to drugs used on livestock, they are becoming resistant to the exact same drugs used in humans.
Throw away all your pills because a steak a day keeps the doctor away. It obviously is way too easy to get drugs for farm animals, so that's something that should be stopped. It would also force farmers to treat animals better so that their immune system can develop naturally.