People are dying because antibiotics are overused

Acting now to protect the effectiveness of antibiotics will save lives in the future.

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Antibiotics form the bedrock of modern medicine. They protect us from infectious diseases that regularly killed people until after World War II. However, we’re seeing dangerous cracks in that bedrock. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just released a new report estimating that more than 35,000 people die in the United States each year from infections that antibiotics can no longer treat.

Rampant overuse of the drugs has fueled this crisis. Overusing antibiotics, either in human health care or on farms, gives bacteria more chances to develop drug resistance and eventually, to withstand our best treatments. 

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About two-thirds of medically important antibiotics sold in this country go to livestock  production. Industrial farms pack animals into confined spaces, sacrificing basic hygiene and increasing stress for the livestock along the way. Raising animals in this way might produce more, slightly cheaper meat, but it also leads to increased levels of disease. Instead of addressing the root causes of disease by changing the conditions the animals are kept in, meat producers often opt for the easy road--resorting to routine antibiotics in feed and water. The drugs may keep the impending disease at bay, but the tradeoff is rising rates of resistance. Bacteria regularly exposed to antibiotics first survive, then spread.

Most people can’t tell you the name of the farm that produced the meat they eat, but they can tell you at what restaurants they eat the meat. Restaurants purchase a large portion of the meat sold in this country, and by leveraging their considerable purchasing power, companies including Chicago-based McDonald’s can compel their meat suppliers to use antibiotics responsibly. That reduces overall antibiotic use, and slows the rising rates of drug resistance. 

We’ve seen it before. After considerable consumer pressure, large restaurant chains began requiring the chicken they serve to be raised with responsible antibiotic use practices. McDonald’s helped lead the way with its chicken supplies. Today, according to an industry survey, around 92 percent of the broiler chickens produced in the United States are raised without the routine use of medically important antibiotics as defined by the Food and Drug Administration. It’s a major victory for public health, but there’s more work to do, especially in the beef industry.

Beef producers purchase more medically important antibiotics than any other meat sector. Some companies notably McDonald’s, are already developing plans to reduce antibiotic use throughout much of their vast global beef supplies. In an annual scorecard which grades the nation’s top chain restaurants on their antibiotic use policies, McDonald’s, jumped from an ‘F’ in last year’s report to a ‘C’ in this year’s. Most other top fast food and fast casual chains — 15 altogether — failed because they have no established policy to restrict antibiotic use in their beef supply chains.

The updated CDC numbers demonstrate the urgency of the situation. Since the estimates were last updated in 2013, the number of antibiotic-resistant Salmonella infections have more than doubled, from 100,000 cases to 215,000. Although corporate actions from food companies are an important way to make change, we need a uniform standard for responsible antibiotic use that all meat producers follow.

That’s why we’re calling on the Illinois Assembly to quickly pass SB3429, which would greatly restrict the use of medically important antibiotics on farms. It would preserve the ability to treat sick animals with antibiotics, but prohibit meat producers from using the drugs to prevent disease brought on by cramming so many animals together in unsanitary conditions. 

People are dying from infections we should be able to treat. Acting now to protect the effectiveness of antibiotics will save lives in the future.

Abe Scarr is the IllinoisPIRG director. Steve Roach is the food safety program director for the Food and Animals Concerns Trust, and the senior analyst for Keep Antibiotics Working. Steve is also a coauthor of the Chain Reaction V Report and Scorecard.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.

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