Around a decade ago, the US implemented new rules to limit the widespread use of antibiotics in meat and dairy production, in an effort to combat the nation’s antibiotic resistance crisis. The regulations helped: Antibiotic sales for use on farms plunged by 43 percent from 2015 to 2017, and plateaued thereafter. But now, that progress appears to be backsliding. According to recently published data from the Food and Drug Administration, sales of antibiotics for use in livestock surged by an alarming 15.8 percent in 2024 from the previous year. The sudden increase worries the scientists I spoke with who track the issue. “It’s disappointing to see such a substantial increase,” Meghan Davis, a veterinarian and associate professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me over email. “Antimicrobial use in food-producing animals matters for human health.” Antibiotics are a bedrock of modern medicine, used to treat common bacterial infections from strep throat to urinary tract infections to E.coli, and they’re a major reason why common infections are generally no longer extremely dangerous in the modern world. According to one estimate, antibiotics have increased average human life expectancy by over 20 years since the early 20th century.

But in the US and around the globe, most antibiotics aren’t used in human medicine, and instead are fed to farmed animals as a means to prevent and treat illness in unhygienic, overcrowded factory farms where disease is prevalent and spreads quickly. The meat industry’s dependence on antibiotics has, in turn, contributed to the rise of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotic treatment. When someone becomes infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, also known as “superbugs,” certain antibiotics are less effective — or entirely ineffective — making common infections harder to treat. The World Health Organization considers antimicrobial resistance to be “one of the top global public health and development threats.”

In 2019, it was responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths globally, with 35,000 of them in the US — and 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the US each year. For a time, the US demonstrated it could make progress on the antibiotic resistance problem. Ten years ago, the livestock industry was even voluntarily pledging to reduce antibiotic use. But now that all appears to have been lip service — and regulators are doing little to rein in the industry’s overuse. Why did meat producers buy so many more antibiotics in 2024? There are only two legitimate reasons why livestock producers might have ramped up their antibiotic purchases in 2024: either they raised a lot more animals or they had to fight off a lot more diseases than usual. But neither explanation makes sense for 2024. Meat production grew by just 0.65 percent last year, and according to several experts I spoke with, there weren’t especially notable disease outbreaks that would explain the sharp increase. A spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services told me that “animal sectors experienced several health challenges in 2024,” pointing to the spread of the avian metapneumovirus in poultry birds and avian influenza, or bird flu, in poultry birds and dairy cattle. But Gail Hansen, an antimicrobial expert and former state public health veterinarian in Kansas, told me that these are viral infections, not bacterial, so using antibiotics to treat them does not make sense........read on    https://gnnhd.tv/news/52873/the-alarming-rise-in-antibiotic-use-by-the-meat-industry