Pressure to tighten up antibiotics on US farms

Farmers in the US may soon be prevented from dosing healthy livestock with antibiotics that encourage faster growth. Pressure to ban the practice has fallen on the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) following a court ruling and the publication of research showing how a strain of bacteria jumped from humans to farmyard animals and back again, picking up antibiotic resistance on the way.

The court ruling, won by the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York, commits the FDA to reconsider a ban first proposed in 1977 on the non-therapeutic farmyard use of penicillin and two other types of antibiotics called tetracyclines in animal feed. These made up about half the 13 million kilograms of antibiotics given to US farmyard animals in 2010, which account for 80 per cent of all antibiotics given in the US.

The ruling coincided with the publication of work by Lance Price of the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Flagstaff, Arizona, and colleagues, who demonstrated for the first time in February how a specific strain of Staphylococcus aureus that originated in humans in 2003, moved into livestock where it acquired resistance to two types of antibiotics, then returned to humans as a new strain of superbug (mBio, DOI: 10.1128/mbio.00305-11).

The FDA announced a ban in January on some farmyard antibiotics, but now faces pressure to broaden the ban to all non-therapeutic uses.

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