18 Antibiotics in Animal Feed Are "High Risk" for Humans and the FDA Approved Them Anyway

A batch of just-released documents show that at least 30 antibiotics commonly used in animal feed have never met FDA standards for use and the agency classified 18 of them as “high risk” yet have continued to allow them to be used.

The documents, obtained and released by the Natural Resources Defense Council, span a decade and show that the FDA’s own review systems suggested some antibiotics that are used in animal feed for "food-producing" livestock could pose a threat to humans.

Of the 30 feed antibiotics reviewed, 26 never met safety standards set by the FDA in 1973 and 18 “posed a high risk of exposing humans to antibiotic-resistant bacteria through the food chain,” according to the documents.

“The evidence is clear. Drugmakers never proved safety. And FDA continues to knowingly allow the use of drugs in animal feed that likely pose a ‘high risk’ to human health,” said Carmen Cordova, lead author of the NRDC’s analysis. Cordova said the documents present “overwhelming evidence” that the FDA isn’t taking the ongoing antibiotic resistance crisis seriously.

And it has become a crisis: The United States uses about 29 million pounds of antibiotics in food production, and uses far more antibiotics doing that than it does fighting human disease. Antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains have been known to jump from pigs to farm workers. Studies have suggested that most raw pork has antibiotic-resistant bacterial living in it, and the CDC has said that overuse of antibiotics has led to salmonella outbreaks. Completely-resistant diseases are also popping up faster than the CDC expected and faster than new antibiotics are coming down the pipeline.

The use of antibiotics that could harm human health in livestock is nothing new: Some of the 30 feed additives analyzed by the FDA in these released documents have been used since the 1950s. The review, which was mandated by Congress in 2001, found problems but no action appears to have been taken. All of the 30 questionable antibiotics remain approved for use, and an FDA spokesperson told the Washington Post that they didn’t think any further action was necessary.

“FDA has a pattern of turning a blind eye to its own scientific findings,” Jackie Wei, a spokesperson for NRDC said. “FDA has acknowledged the risks to human health from the misuse of antibiotics in livestock since at least the mid 1970s, when it first proposed to stop the use of certain antibiotics in animal feed. It has never followed through.”

Recently, the FDA has taken initial steps to curb antibiotic use in livestock, announcing last month that it plans to phase out the use of antibiotics to promote growth. Critics of that guidance point out that it is not legally binding and that antibiotics can still be misused, as long as they are labeled differently.

Steven Roach, of Keep Antibiotics Working, said at the time that “companies will either ignore the plan altogether or simply switch from using antibiotics for routing growth promotion to using the same antibiotics for routine disease prevention.”