What Percentage Of Antibiotics Sold In The Us Go Into Animal Feed

Two weeks ago, I broke the news of a new FDA report that estimated for the first time the amount of antibiotics sold in the United States every twelvemonth for use in agriculture: 28.viii one thousand thousand pounds.

That long-awaited report didn't answer a crucial question: What book of antibiotics are sold in the United States each twelvemonth for homo utilize. Information technology'south a crucial question considering, in reply to concerns about antibody resistance arising on farms, the answer has always been that human medicine is equally culpable because it uses like volumes of antibiotics.

The merely research that has attempted to answer that question is independent in a decade-old report by the Union of Concerned Scientists that put the proportion of antibiotics going to animals at 70 pct of the U.South. total.

That UCS report and approximate are a decade old non considering no one has cared about the topic, just because accurate updated figures have been so hard to get. And so we owe a special holiday give thanks-you to the researchers at the Center for a Livable Future, who decided the release of the FDA report justified some other endeavour to get the numbers straight. They succeeded.

The proportion of antibiotics sold in the The states each year that go to animals turns out to be not seventy percent, merely rather 80 percent. Hither's CLF'due south Ralph Loglisci, who got the confirmatory numbers from the FDA:

In accordance with a 2008 amendment to the Creature Drug User Fee Act, for the first time the FDA released terminal week an almanac amount of antimicrobial drugs sold and distributed for employ in nutrient animals. The grand total for 2009 is 13.ane million kilograms or 28.8 one thousand thousand pounds. I ... contacted the FDA for an estimate of the volume of antibiotics sold for man use in 2009. This is what a spokesperson told me:

"Our Office of Surveillance and Epidemiology just finished an analysis based on IMS Wellness data. Sales information in kilograms sold for selected antibacterial drugs were obtained as a surrogate of man antibacterial drug use in the U.S. market. Approximately three.iii 1000000 kilograms of antibacterial drugs were sold in year 2009. OSE states that all information in this analysis have been cleared for public use by IMS Health, IMS National Sales Perspectives™."

3.iii million kilograms is a little over seven million pounds. Equally far as I tin decide, this is the outset time the FDA has made data on estimates of human usage public.

At its blog, CLF lays out the math for each major drug class as sold for fauna use and human being apply, with a long discussion of the significance of the dissimilar drug classes. Here's the CLF table summing upwardly the math, but please go over to CLF's blog for its discussion.

Nearly of import to note: Most of the drugs used in animal agriculture and in human medicine are functionally identical. That's one reason why the overuse of antibiotics in animals is such a concern: When organisms go resistant on the subcontract to drugs used on livestock, they are becoming resistant to the exact aforementioned drugs used in humans. (1 major drug category used in animals, ionophores, do non have a direct human analog. But utilise of them on farms is still a business, because resistance factors tin move freely betwixt species of bacteria. That's a discussion for another day.)

Loglisci's conclusion is also worth underlining:

The next battle, which industry has already begun, is defining what non-therapeutic utilise volition constitute. Producers are already claiming that the use of antibiotics for growth promotion has decreased, maintaining current low-dose usage is aimed at disease prevention. Regardless, all low-dose usage of antibiotics can lead to a meaning increase in antibiotic resistance.

Image: Flickr/Epsos

Source: https://www.wired.com/2010/12/news-update-farm-animals-get-80-of-antibiotics-sold-in-us/

Posted by: washingtonmorave.blogspot.com