Just say NO to drugs in your meat: A plan to preserve antibiotics
The marvel of modern medicine is in jeopardy. A growing pool of antibiotic-resistant pathogens, increasingly immune to our arsenal of prescription drugs, weighs heavily on our already-inflated health care budget. Leading experts attribute much of the responsibility for this “Multi-Billion Dollar Health Care Crisis” to the practice of feeding low doses of antibiotics to livestock in order to expediate growth. Fortunately, Representative Louise Slaughter (D-NY) has a plan that may serve as the first step towards solving this problem.
This Wednesday, Rep. Slaughter will join CLF Director Dr. Robert Lawrence and other leading experts for a Congressional briefing on nontherapeutic antimicrobial use in livestock. The briefing follows her recent re-introduction of the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA). The bill is backed by a growing body of organizations who agree that the effectiveness of antibiotics in treating human disease is not worth compromising for the sake of a cheaper burger, pork loin or chicken breast. The ban seems like good sense, given the American public ultimately ends up paying, in spades, for the higher cost of treating resistant infections – estimated at $6,000 to $10,000 more, per hospital visit, than treating a non-resistant infection.