Combing through piles of documents obtained by a Freedom of Information Act request, an environmental group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, said Monday that the Food and Drug Administration relies on dated environmental assessments when approving antibiotics for use in livestock.
As we reported here, “In March, the head of the Centers for Disease Control issued an alarm, echoed by virtually every health authority in the world, that antibiotic-resistant bacteria threaten to return humans to the days when ordinary infections routinely killed and maimed.
“Yet the United States continues to use at least 70 percent of its antibiotics on livestock, to shave pennies per pound from the price of pork chops or chicken wings that are consumed by millions of Americans every day.”
The agency is implementing a voluntary rule to eliminate the use of the drugs to fatten animals, but it is not yet final. Routinely giving low doses of antibiotics to large numbers of healthy animals crowded together creates ideal conditions for bacteria to become resistant. The FDA does not intend to restrict the use of routine low doses to prevent infections in healthy animals, which also promotes resistance.
PEER found that the FDA has approved 53 drugs for so-called non-therapeutic use without doing any environmental assessment, using a “categorical exclusion” under the nation’s basic environmental law known as NEPA. The agency is also relying on environmental reviews done as long ago as the 1980s.
That means many of the antibiotics used for livestock have never been studied for their impact on the environment, including their contribution to resistance, or whether they wind up in rivers and other water sources. Some of the assessments don’t even look at the environmental impact of using antibiotics on large numbers of animals, but only on the environmental effects of their manufacture.
PEER lawyer Kathryn Douglass said one drug was analyzed in the mid-90s for use on 200 cows. “Fast forward to 2011 and it’s used on 500,000 pigs,” she said. Douglass said the group had to sue the FDA to get the documents.
Reps. Louise Slaughter, D-NY, and Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, and Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Kristen Gillibrand, D-NY, are sponsoring legislation to get more information on how antibiotics are used in livestock and to restrict their use for fattening and diseases prevention. They’ve been working on the issue for decades but have gotten nowhere in Congress. The farming and pharmaceutical industries strongly oppose restrictions.