A coalition of 65 organizations filed a rulemaking petition with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Tuesday urging the agency to end routine antibiotic use in food-producing animals, citing decades of evidence linking the practice to a deadly and growing antibiotic resistance crisis.
According to the coalition, every year, antibiotic-resistant bacteria contribute to approximately 35,000 deaths and 2.8 million illnesses in the United States. The petition, organized by the environmental law organization Earthjustice, argues the FDA has a legal obligation to act and has failed to do so.
More than 70% of antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used in the meat industry. Each year, 34 million pounds of antibiotics are used in livestock feed and water, the largest single use of antibiotics in the country. Petitioners say the drugs are administered not to treat diagnosed illness but to sustain crowded, industrial animal operations.
“For decades, pharmaceutical and meat corporations have prioritized profit and hidden the consequences of their practices on human health, animal welfare, and the environment,” said Peter Lehner, Managing Attorney for Earthjustice’s Sustainable Food and Farming program. “The FDA is obligated to ensure that drugs given to animals do not harm humans. Yet, despite overwhelming scientific evidence, the FDA has allowed this practice to continue.”
Health experts state that the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria weakens the effectiveness of medicines people depend on for surgery, chemotherapy, organ transplantation, treating illnesses and caring for premature infants.
Signatories include Consumer Reports, Health Care Without Harm, Moms Across America, Sierra Club, the Center for Food Safety, Farm Aid and the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy, among dozens of health, environmental, farming, farmworker, consumer and animal welfare organizations.
“Throughout my career, I saw firsthand the consequences of antibiotic-resistant infections: limited and more toxic treatment options, more severe and prolonged illness, and poorer outcomes, including death,” said Cheryl Ruble, a retired infectious disease physician and Sierra Club volunteer leader. “It is long past time to end this unnecessary and dangerous practice.”
The petition specifically calls on the FDA to withdraw approval for disease prevention uses and long-duration administration of medically important antibiotics in livestock. It also requests the agency mandate accurate collection of antibiotic usage data by species and sector and establish usage reduction targets.
“Consumers shouldn’t have to worry that the meat they’re feeding their families is quietly making life-saving medicines less effective,” said Michael Hansen, Senior Scientist at Consumer Reports. “Antibiotics are still being used in livestock as a matter of routine rather than to treat diagnosed diseases — fueling a resistance crisis that puts our health at risk. The FDA has both the tools and the obligation to act.”
The evidence presented by the group suggests that sustainable livestock production is possible without routine antibiotic use. The chicken industry, for example, uses ten times fewer antibiotics per pound of meat produced than the cattle or swine industries, and thousands of farmers raise animals with very low levels of antibiotics or none at all.
“The antimicrobial resistance crisis is upon us,” said Christopher Heaney, an environmental and occupational epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “The quantities of antimicrobial drugs used in food animal production pose a risk to human health and far exceed the quantities used in human medicine.”
The full petition and executive summary are available on the Earthjustice website.
