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This month's FDA guidance for reducing livestock antibiotics will actually make things worse, animal welfare and food activist groups are saying. "The FDA is using a garden hose on a forest fire," says Farm Sanctuary Senior Policy Director Bruce Friedrich. The guidance is a "diversion" that pretends to address the problem of factory farm-driven antibiotic resistance, which sickens 2 million in the US and kills 23,000 a year, while accomplishing nothing. By asking drug makers to voluntarily renounce the use of antibiotics for livestock growth on their labels, the guidance "won't cost the industry a penny" or reduce antibiotic use at all, says Friedrich. The reason? Factory farm antibiotics are also used to treat sickness which the crowded conditions tempt--a use that is still allowed under the guidance. Only the wording will change, says Friedrich.
In a December 11 conference call, the FDA's Michael Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, William T. Flynn, deputy director for science policy and USDA's Thomas J. Myers, associate deputy administrator, told reporters that the government is asking drug makers to voluntarily restrict the uses on their antibiotic labels--yes, asking --in a shocking gift of self-regulation. Similar honor systems exist at slaughterhouses since Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) was instituted in 1998 in which industry creates its own safety plan which the government simply cosigns. A similar honor system called the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point-Based Inspection Models Project (HIMP) is imminent for poultry slaughterhouses.
Why are the FDA and USDA allowing industry to write its own ticket? (And why would industry write itself out of its own profits?) Because to mandate the changes would require "hundreds of separate regulations" and actions, whined government officials on the conference call. It is easier to just say please to industry.
To many reporters on the conference call, the plans sounded like fluff. If the changes are voluntary, "what will enforce" them and serve as an "incentive" asked an ABC reporter? Food producers and drug companies need no incentive retorted Michael Taylor because they are starting to phase out antibiotics "for their own reasons"--citing McDonald's and KFC. Right.
If factory farmers actually phased out antibiotics (which prevent animals from becoming sick in high density-farming) won't livestock producers "have to move to different buildings" asked a reporter from Reuters. That's why we are giving industry three years to comply replied William Flynn.
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