California Farmer | August, 2001 | Len Richardson, Editor
Acronyms make my skin crawl, but if you have Microsoft Windows, you know that BSOD stands for Blue Screen of Death. It's what happens when Windows doesn't like something you've done and gives you that dreaded, "you have performed an illegal operation" screen.
Animal agriculture's BSOD is human resistance to antibiotics. Livestock producers and the animal health industry are deceiving themselves in the belief that nontherapeutic use of antibiotics is an ounce of prevention. A revolt started by the San Francisco Medical Society (SFMS) has ballooned into a full scale BSOD now that our local physicians won the support of the powerful American Medical Association (AMA).
More and more experts see nontherapeutic antibiotic use as a crutch for sloppy managers to limit losses from bad husbandry practices. It will be the BSOD for large-scale animal confinement unless the industry stops fighting the medical community and takes animal health seriously. The argument that improved feed efficiency is needed in an overall animal health program and may reduce subclinical diseases, won't be worth debating if consumers believe that we are increasing their health risk. And that is what their doctor is telling them.
And the good doctors are asking Congress and federal regulators to limit use of these farm drugs. To their credit, the AMA has resolved to "establish a national program to counter antibiotic resistance in [human] clinical practices."
At the root of the disagreement is the near-total lack of accurate public data on animal drug use and husbandry practices. This oversight can be traced to the doorsteps of the animal health, feed and pharmaceutical industries that are stonewalling. If farmers want to keep therapeutic use of antibiotics, they had better wake their suppliers now.
The only solid facts on use come from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) in a "Hogging It" report. The report estimated total antibiotic use at around 35 million pounds annually (not 50 million as claimed), with nontherapeutic ag uses in three species accounting for about 24 million, compared to just 3 million pounds per year used in human medicine. "That's about eight pounds of antibiotics fed to basically healthy animals for every pound given to people fighting infections/diseases," says UCS's Margaret Mellon. The report's basic finding has gone essentially unchallenged, she adds.
In October 2000, the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine proposed to withdraw enrofloxacin from animal use. To their credit, California poultry farmers were ready to voluntarily pull the product, when the major supplier chose to fight the FDA decision, signaling that the animal health industry would rather fight than switch.
Homegrown solutions work best, as illustrated by the California Dairy Quality Assurance Program. A similar program to develop and fund an antibiotic certification and education program in alliance with SFMS, vets and CDFA could become a national model and eliminate the Blue Screen of Death for antibiotics.California Farmer:
