The alarming rise in antibiotic use by the meat industry |
Around a decade ago, the US implemented new rules to limit the widespread use of antibiotics in meat and dairy production, in an effort to combat the nation’s antibiotic resistance crisis. The regulations helped: Antibiotic sales for use on farms plunged by 43 percent from 2015 to 2017, and plateaued thereafter.
But now, that progress appears to be backsliding. According to recently published data from the Food and Drug Administration, sales of antibiotics for use in livestock surged by an alarming 15.8 percent in 2024 from the previous year.
The sudden increase worries the scientists I spoke with who track the issue.
“It’s disappointing to see such a substantial increase,” Meghan Davis, a veterinarian and associate professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me over email. “Antimicrobial use in food-producing animals matters for human health.”
Antibiotics are a bedrock of modern medicine, used to treat common bacterial infections from strep throat to urinary tract infections to E.coli, and they’re a major reason why common infections are generally no longer extremely dangerous in the modern world. According to one estimate, antibiotics have increased average human life expectancy by over 20 years since the early 20th century.
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But in the US and around the globe, most antibiotics aren’t used in human medicine, and instead are fed to farmed animals as a means to prevent and treat illness in