statement
Statement on Hogging It!: Estimates of Antimicrobial Abuse in Livestock
This statement by Margaret Mellon, Ph.D., J.D., director of the UCS Food and Environment Program, and co-author of the report "Hogging It: Estimates of Antimicrobial Abuse in Livestock", was given at the press conference announcing the report's release.
January 8, 2001
Thank you for coming. We are here today to release a report that we believe will change the nature of the debate about the animal use of antibiotics. For decades, this debate has been held against the backdrop of a major misconception -- that the amount of antibiotics used in animals is minor compared to human medical use. In fact, the opposite appears to be true. It is livestock use, not human medicine, that is hogging antibiotics.
We, like many in the public health community, are concerned by the growing specter of antibiotic-resistant disease. This past year, newspapers and medical journals have been filled with stories about diseases -- like pneumonia, food poisoning and blood-borne infections -- that are increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to treat. This is because these diseases have become resistant to antibiotics. The fear is that the age of miracle drugs ushered in by the advent of penicillin in the 1940's might be drawing to a close.
Antibiotic resistance is on the rise because antibiotics are overused or misused in a number of settings -- human medicine, agriculture, veterinary medicine and consumer products. UCS has chosen to focus on the agricultural uses of antibiotics, primarily in livestock systems -- cattle, swine and poultry. In these systems, antibiotics are used not only for therapy but also for nontherapeutic purposes like growth promotion.
When we began looking into antibiotics and meat production we started with seemingly simple questions -- was use in agriculture going up or down? How did agricultural use compare to medical use?
We assumed that someone in the government had the use data needed to answer these questions -- and we commissioned a small study to find them and compile them. We found that -- with one small exception, antibiotics used as pesticides -- no one in the government had the needed data. Not the Food and Drug Administration, the US Department of Agriculture, not the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. How can you begin to solve a problem without a basic understanding of its contours?
To make a long story short, we decided to do what the government hadn't -- to estimate the quantities of antibiotics used for purposes other than therapy in the three big sectors of animal agriculture -- cattle, swine and poultry. Coauthors Charles and Karen Lutz Benbrook devised a methodology based on publicly available data that Dr. Benbrook will describe in a minute. They also devised a methodology for estimating the quantities of antibiotics used in human medicine.
The data they came up with are the only antibiotic use data based on a published methodology -- and they are startling.
Our report finds that there are 25 million pounds of antibiotics used in cattle, swine and poultry for nontherapeutic purposes, including growth promotion and disease prevention. The breakdown is about 4 million pounds in cattle, almost ll million pounds in swine, and 10 million pounds in poultry.
By contrast, the report finds only 3 million pounds of antibiotics are used in human medicine. That means we are using 8 times the amount of antibiotics in healthy animals as we are using to treat diseases in our children and ourselves.
How do our numbers compare with others? Last year, the Animal Health Institute issued a brief report indicating that only about 18 million pounds of antibiotics were used for animals -- apparently for all animal uses -- nontherapeutic and therapeutic, pets and livestock, fish and fowl. I say apparently because there was no methodology accompanying the report so we do know which classes of uses were included and which were excluded. But it appears that the UCS figure for nontherapeutic use in only three animal species is 40% higher than AHI's estimate for all uses in all animal species.
The AHI report also indicated that 32 million pounds of antibiotics were devoted to human use -- almost 10 times our estimate for human medical use. Again, we don't know whether the AHI actually obtained any data on human use. It appears that it simply subtracted its 17.8 million-pound figure for animal use from an oft-used number for total use -- 50 million pounds -- and called it human use. In any case, its presentation leaves the impression that animal use is small relative to human use.
UCS wanted to produce a better estimate of the share of the total that agricultural use represented. We had a problem. The 50 million-pound figure used by AHI -- and to be fair, by many others -- had little foundation. We tracked it down and found that it was based primarily on extrapolation and repetition. We didn't feel comfortable using it.
So, we proceeded to use the sound numbers that we calculated -- the 25 million pounds for nontherapeutic livestock use and the 3 million pounds for human medical use -- and also the 50,000 pounds of antibiotics used as pesticides -- a government-backed figure -- as the basis of a new estimate of total use. For those categories for which we had no calculations or government figures -- for example, therapeutic uses and consumer product uses, we estimated as best we could.
Our results are that total antibiotic production is more like 35 million than 50 million pounds and 70% of total antibiotic production is devoted to nontherapeutic use in three livestock sectors. That is a far cry from the commonly held estimate that agriculture use represents only 40% of total antibiotic production.
The bottom line is that our data suggest that agricultural use of antibiotics is likely to be a larger part of the antibiotic-resistance problem than is currently thought.
In sum, our report indicates that antibiotic use in agriculture far exceeds use in human medicine. UCS hopes that this new perspective will increase the urgency behind the drive to curb the unnecessary uses of antibiotics in livestock. We and others in the medical, environmental, and consumer community have joined together in pursuit of that goal, starting with the use of medically important antibiotics used as growth promoters.
We urge that the FDA move ahead swiftly to establish a program to compel companies to provide production data on agricultural antibiotics and that the USDA begin to collect and compile usage data from livestock producers.
The price of complacency on this issue could set us back to an era where untreatable infectious diseases are regrettably commonplace.
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