U.S. FDA to phase out some antibiotic use in animal production | Hacker News Reader

U.S. FDA to phase out some antibiotic use in animal production

reuters.com

195 pointsbrianmartinek65 comments

The use of antibiotics in food stock should be banned completely. Saving a few cents per pound on meat isn't worth the damage to our antibiotic stock. Wanna give antibiotics to an animal, fine, but now it can't be used for food.

It is oddly cruel to see that logic applied in organic meats. An animal might become infected. It might die a very painful and slow death. But to keep organic certification, not antibiotic maybe used on the farm.

Even for animal that will become food, I would think that kindness should be applied. If it is sick/infected, but still useful for meat, cure it and eat it. If not, just kill it. Don't let it suffer.

Organic farmers have approved antibiotics they can use (as well as natural remedies). If a dairy cow is treated with antibiotics the holding time before she is allowed back into the milking process is usually double or triple the normal holding time for a non-organic cow (10-15 days vs 5 days). Sh is still milked but the milk is poured away.

Isn't there something more useful they could do with that milk than pour it away?

It would have to be a non-food application, if we are trying to isolate the antibiotics. The only non-food application of milk that I am aware of is casein plastics.

And casein paint. Non-toxic, solvent free; used in 'traditional' building, along with other wonderful materials like lime plaster and wattle and daub.

Yes it can be sold as Class B product (not organic) (usually to cheese manufacturers). It just can't be sold as organic.

I think 'wasting' it is good. Once you find something useful for it, it perverts the incentives. A sick cow should be considered a complete waste with no benefit.

I think there is a lot of ground between pouring something down the drain and it being worth its weight in gold.

When I was young we'd always spray the kittens with it. (I grew up on a dairy farm, fortunately we got rid of the cows when I was about 7)

They loved the whole situation.

Why fortunately?

If mitchty is like all the former dairy farmers I know, it's because dairy farming is a lot of hard work, and it never ends. There are no weekends, and no holidays. I like raising beef cattle because many days you don't even have to look at them. (Not today though! Ice to break on the pond, for starters...)

I can agree with this 100% - much of my family out in Iowa raises dairy. They never get a vacation. Ever.

In regards to the announcement, without teeth, this won't cause any changes. External enforcement is absolutely necessary to make this stick.

Yep, you're both 100% right. Dairy cattle are basically a prison sentence.

We had regular cattle too, those amounted to looking at the pasture they're in and moving them around. Way less upkeep.

What kind of beef cattle do you raise? I'm trying to track down heritage breeds but having some trouble. If you have any leads please contact me through the email address in my profile.

Red Angus, with some commercial cattle as ET recips. I don't know anything about "heritage" breeds. I'd recommend Red Angus for all but the very hottest parts of the USA (and other nations at similar latitudes): they tolerate heat better than Black Angus but after all most of the genetics did come from Scotland! They are very docile, and the breed organization emphasizes valuable commercial traits like calving ease, weight gain, and ribeye area. Red Angus bulls are a great cross if your herd needs better carcasses, maternal characteristics, or thriftiness. See http://redangus.org/ for more info.

Don't break it, skate on it.

Generally a bad idea when the cows need the pond to drink.

Haha yeah we try to use different ponds for those two purposes. Actually when possible I prefer to keep cattle out of ponds entirely for environmental reasons, but faucets freeze too. I have a feeling that by the time this winter starts, I'll be hoping for some global warming.

Unfortunately, cow milk is only useful as a human beverage.

Or a cow beverage. Could this milk be useful for feeding to calves?

Thanks, Crito. I glad someone else sees the absurdity of drinking another animal's milk.

I see a new market for milk baths!

Yeah, but then everyone will want organic milk baths, so they won't be able to use the milk for that either

Possibly composted. That's about it.

Bacteria is needed for composting to happen. Milk with antibiotics in it would hurt that process.

If you're in a professional ag setting (farm, etc), that small amount of milk (and even smaller amount of antibiotics in said milk) should pale in comparison to the amount of material in your compost setup. Should be fine, although I'm willing to test this theory out.

Disclaimer: I'm not a farmer, but I do manage the IT/automation of my/a family farm.

This seems like exactly the kind of "slowly and steadily select for antibiotic resistance in bacteria" behavior that they're trying to avoid with these changes.

Maybe

But below a certain concentration some antibiotics won't have an effect hence, no evolutionary pressure

If at the concentration presented it kills/affects some bacteria, yes, what you mention happens, otherwise it doesn't.

Of course, I may be wrong

I think that banning of antibiotic use in livestock generally focuses on the preemptive addition of antibiotics in feed. Antibiotic additives are associated with increased weight gain for the animals, as well as letting feed lots put more animals in denser quarters while keeping disease rates down. These direct economic drivers are why industry has fought the regulations for so long - despite the long-term detrimental societal health costs. It's pretty much a classic case of an economic externality needing regulation.

Edit: here's a reference link http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-...

They use antibiotics in part because they keep animals in such close proximity. Disease spreads quickly in those conditions. In other words, they're creating the conditions that you would say justify the use of antibiotics.

You can't leave a loophole, or else companies will simply take advantage of it, even if it's to the detriment of society as a whole.

I wholeheartedly agree :) However in the American meat industry, terminally ill animals are universally culled in short order.

Shit, this may not apply to the dairy industry however. I found this on an organic dairy website http://www.oberweis.com/web/milk.asp:

"Organic certification requires that milk be discarded for 12 months after antibiotic use. This has the unfortunate side effect of making a sick cow such a financial burden to a farm that it must frequently be killed. When this happens, organic farmers generally milk the sick cow (and sell her milk to be bottled as organic) as she gets sicker and sicker and as the quality of her milk deteriorates. She is slaughtered once her milk approaches legal limits."

So that sucks.

Does anyone have any statistics on how many dairy cows are killed per year because of this?

I suspect we are looking at a lesser-of-two-evils scenario: would you rather have a small number of cows culled each year because of sickness, or a large number of cows living in feedlots and pre-emptively given antibiotics because of squalid living conditions?

This. Would be nice to have some stats but I suspect you're right.

Another excellent reason to not eat meat.

It's dead in the end either way. If you assume we're going to eat it.

Is it worth an extra animal's worth of meat for an extra animal's worth of anti-bacterial resistance, that's the core question here. If we're not using these antibiotics so widely to prevent the infection in the first place how does that scale?

It may be better, in the long run, just to say 'no antibiotics in animals' and kill those that become ill out of hand. Otherwise I can see this becoming an easy out for farmers - they could still keep the animals in atrocious conditions, knowing that they can use AB to cure them after they become ill - and if a large number of them become ill then we'll be in exactly the same pickle we are now.

I'm not against antibiotics being used to treat individual sick animals. That's a whole different proposition from employing them as a food supplement and just dosing the entire herd as a prophylactic.

Think you're on the right track here. Antibiotics are used as a way of enabling livestock (hoof, beak or gill) to be bread in closer confines with high energy rich feed that, naturally, the livestock could not cope with.

Expect massive push back from the various farming industries affected by this. Money uber alles.

Deleted comment

Lots of university extension websites discuss the use of antibiotic feed additives. They increase food energy conversion by something like 5%. They don't particularly enable "high energy rich feed that, naturally, the livestock could not cope with", but I guess they do reduce some issues associated with feeding corn (but that's probably a statistical thing, not an every single animal thing).

Feedlots use corn to fatten the beef herd before slaughter. Feeding a high corn diet to cattle can cause acidosis of the Rumen stomach (one the four compartments in cattle stomachs).

You can prevent this through feeding a more balanced feed mix however this slows down the fattening process.

Acidosis can cause the stomach to rupture. Antibiotics are used to help control this and deal with side effects of acidosis.

No they should be used. Just shouldn't be the way they are used now. Animal is sick - treat him, but first you must take every possible way to prevent disease in the first place. Like giving the animals space/grass and better fecal matter removal. Space the herd and you reduce drastically the chances of outbreak.

You're right, if we could do it properly.

The sad thing is that we're not starting from a first principle that animal welfare is even something to care about. Ignoring the fact that they're all slaughtered, these animals live a really bleak existence.

You make a good point, but despite all the farming subsidies, the economics of raising animals to eat them are still pretty bad. Fecal management, spacing herds, different feed...none of those things are viable at any scale approaching what is expected to meet the demand. Small farmers aren't paid enough and the larger places are just factories.

>worth the damage to our antibiotic stock It isn't worth damaging our future by needlessly speeding up drug resistance either

"'Because antimicrobial drug use in both humans and animals can contribute to the development of antimicrobial resistance, it is important to use these drugs only when medically necessary,' the FDA said in a release." This is long overdue. The FDA action is consistent with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommendations in the United States and with agricultural regulations in the European Union. We have discussed the science behind this no-brainer recommendation several times here on Hacker News.[1]

Yes, veterinarians may need to treat animal diseases with antibiotics. Antibiotics are in several cases "natural" substances that evolved through natural selection, mycotoxins emitted by fungi, or bacterial toxins emitted by one clade of bacteria, with the effect of killing bacteria in a world full of bacteria. The bacteria susceptible to antibiotics, in turn, have long been under selection pressure to evolve resistance to antiobiotics, as some strains of bacteria did long ago in the wild. The use of antibiotics in human medicine has revolutionized several forms of medical treatment and added millions of years of healthy life to humankind's prospects, but use of antibiotics must go hand-in-hand with other forms of infection control to minimize selective sweeps of antibiotic resistance as a trait among most harmful strains of bacteria. It's a bad trade-off to use antibiotics without veterinary indications in general animal husbandry, so this regulatory step is a step in the right direction.

Meanwhile, the already established multiple-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis are very worrisome,[2] and will have to be a focus of much research and urgent public-health campaigns.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6599040

[2] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230344420...

http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-23/news...

http://www.iom.edu/Reports/2012/Facing-the-Reality-of-Drug-R...

http://www.tbcindia.nic.in/pdfs/RNTCP%20Response%20DR%20TB%2...

Yeah. Not really worth it to make meat 0.6 cents a pound cheaper.

This guidelines are just voluntary? What's the point?

"'Our fear ... is that there will be no reduction in antibiotic use as companies will either ignore the plan altogether or simply switch from using antibiotics for routine growth promotion to using the same antibiotics for routine disease prevention,' said Steven Roach, senior analyst with advocacy group Keep Antibiotics Working."

One good aspect of this is that producers will able able to advertise their food as being raised without unecessary antibiotics. Many milk producers prefer not to use the growth hormone rBST, but because the FDA has no found any difference in the quality of milk between cows that are administered rBST and those that are not, producers who prefer not to use it have to put a disclaimer on their on their milk stating this FDA finding to prevent legal action from producers who do use that additive. With an FDA guideline saying 'better not to use antibiotics as a food additive' producers can draw consumers' attention to that fact without having to use defensive legal language that undercuts their message.

My understanding with FDA guidelines is they are always "voluntary" only in name. Companies effectively have to comply or the FDA will crack down very hard on the company.

I really doubt it. The FDA is heavily influenced by whatever administration is in power and administrations are heavily influenced by lobbyists.

This is why it's a voluntary guideline.

Food companies are usually following a more-strict standard set by their customers.

Many food industry quality control practices are effectively determined by consumer demand rather than the FDA/USDA. It's often that, as a manufacturer, your customer audit will be more intensive than the government one. The feds just don't have enough auditors to really keep a close look on anything but the most "at risk" plants, so the food industry is basically watching itself in a circular manner. Retail food establishments are auditing their suppliers, who are auditing their suppliers, and so on.

I hear that the FDA will also be releasing a recommendation to close the barn door after the cows get out.

You just can't be too careful, you know.

You're right, this is long overdue, however hind sight is 20/20 and late is better than never.

The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago; the second-best time is now.

Bad things were done before, so clearly they should never be remedied.

You can't unkill the dead, even if you have an honest change of heart. Long-term antibiotic effectiveness may be a dead thing.

> Long-term antibiotic effectiveness may be a dead thing.

Or they may not. It's better to try to keep it alive while we are still unsure.

Long-term antibiotic effectiveness may be a dead thing.

Perhaps it will be, or at least it will for the medications we currently use. However, if we lose current antibiotics before finding or developing alternatives of similar or better effectiveness, human medicine is going to regress by decades and many people are going to suffer horribly. It's not just the obvious direct benefits of antibiotics we're going to lose, it's everything else that will go with them.

Dumping antibiotics all over the place via food production methods is absurdly wasteful of what might be a limited resource. Even if the eventual loss of current capabilities really is inevitable, putting back the date when it happens as much as possible to allow for research into alternatives could literally be a win on a global scale. This change is long overdue.

Joking aside, if there was monetary gain to be had from leaving the barn door open, you bet business would take full advantage of it.

Consumer demand is actually a pretty effective way to enact change in the food industry. If you punish the grocery stores and restaurants, the pain will be felt all the way up the supply chain. Walmart et al. pay very close attention to consumer demand and they can, and will, strong-arm their suppliers into complying.

(Edit: This is not to say that there shouldn't also be strict government regulations as well.)

For me the big issue is the phrase "animal production".

Not farming, rearing, husbandry, but straight to the point factory industrial production.

How about phasing it out immediately for vegetables and fruits?

Because learning about that has freaked me out for weeks now.

I think this is when my granddad would say, "A day late and a dollar short."

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