By: Andy Coghlan, 12/12/2013
The practice of feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals to fatten them up is being phased out in the US, a move that should help quell antibiotic resistance. However, the Food and Drug Administration has been criticised for failing to make the move compulsory. Antibiotic-resistant microbes are thought to kill 23,000 Americans each year and infect 2 million. In the US, 80 per cent of the antibiotics are given to farm animals. Since resistance develops when microbes are repeatedly exposed to antibiotics, giving them to healthy animals exacerbates the problem.
The FDA, which first proposed a ban in 1977, has told pharmaceutical companies that manufacture medically important antibiotics given to animals to voluntarily withdraw them from use as growth promoters. The manufacturers have three years to change labels on the antibiotics and other antimicrobials to state that they can only be given to animals for veterinary reasons, and prescribed by a vet.
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