• Home
  • About Off The Grid
  • Advertise
  • Contact Us
Saturday, May 10, 2025
  • How-To
  • Grid Threats
  • Survival
  • Gardening
  • Food
  • Worldview
  • Health
  • Privacy
  • Hunting
  • Defense
  • Financial
  • News
  • Misc
No Result
View All Result
  • How-To
  • Grid Threats
  • Survival
  • Gardening
  • Food
  • Worldview
  • Health
  • Privacy
  • Hunting
  • Defense
  • Financial
  • News
  • Misc
No Result
View All Result
Off The Grid News
Home How-To

FDA Enforces Ban on Some Antibiotics in Farm Animals After 34 Year Delay

by Tim George
in How-To
Print Print
FDA Enforces Ban on  Some Antibiotics in Farm Animals After 34 Year Delay
Share on FacebookShare on XShare on TruthEmail Article

WASHINGTON, D.C. — 34 years after issuing a warning about overuse of antibiotics in farm animals, the FDA has finally decided to take its own advice. As a result, the agency issued an order prohibiting certain uses of the cephalosporin class of antibiotics in farm animals, including cattle, swine, chickens and turkeys. The new rules are in effect as of April 5, 2012, according to an announcement from the FDA.

For decades, the meat industry has made a regular practice of using antibiotics like cephalosporins without good reason except to accelerate animal growth by killing internal bacteria. 80 percent of the antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used in animal feed simply to boost animal growth and profits. The danger to the public from this practice has become more and more obvious in recent years.

Today’s bacteria mutate so quickly and are so resistant to antibiotics that infectious disease specialist say the average patient’s treatment is the medical equivalent of whack-a-mole: trying to treat patients in that tiny window of time after a drug is developed but before the microbes have had a chance to mutate to be resistant to the new drugs. Overuse of antibiotics in animals raised for consumption speeds the closure of this window.

The FDA ruled in 1977 that using penicillins, tetracyclines and other antibiotics in farm animals to induce them to grow faster was unsafe. Agency-commissioned research had drawn a definitive link between needless use of antibiotics and the creation of antibiotic-resistant bugs. The agency then began to take steps to withdraw its approval for the use of antibiotics in animal feed simply to stimulate growth. It did so by initiating comments periods during which it offered “notices of opportunity for a hearing.”

The agency’s “comments” period lasted from 1977 until 2012. During this 34-year-period, the FDA was under pressure from Congress – bolstered by campaign money from pharmaceutical and agricultural interests – to take no action. It wasn’t until a federal judge ruled against the FDA in March of this year that the agency picked up where it has left off in 1977 to enforce a ban on certain agricultural uses of popular antibiotics.

Cephalosporins, the class of antibiotics that have finally been prohibited for “extra-label” uses in farm animals, are widely used in humans for the treatment of pneumonia, skin and soft tissue infections, pelvic inflammatory disease, foot infections in diabetics, and urinary tract infections. If cephalosporins fail to knock out these infections, doctors must move on to other classes of antibiotics, many of which are less effective and have more unpleasant side effects.

Under the new FDA rules finally put in place, pharmaceutical companies may no longer sell, and farmers may no longer administer, cephalosporin drugs at unapproved dose levels, frequencies, durations or routes of administration. It is also prohibited to use cephalosporins drugs in cattle, swine, chickens or turkeys that are not approved for use in that particular animal (farms using drugs intended for dogs and cats in cows, for example). Finally, cephalosporin may be used only for disease treatment, not for disease prevention.

Researchers say the agency’s long-delayed action on cephalosporin is a good first step. But a first step is all it is. “The ban of cephalosporin is probably a good start in my opinion, but it’s not nearly as far as we need to go,” Murray Borrello, director of the environmental studies program at Alma College in Michigan, told the Great Lakes Echo.

Borrello has been studying the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria on large industrial farms in Michigan. What he found was that these farms today are breeding grounds for bacteria resistant to the antibiotic tetracycline, that they literally float in the air around these farms. The new FDA ruling, however, fails to cover tetracycline, which is far more widely used in animal feed than cephalosporin. As a result, Borrello says, the FDA’s action is likely to make only the smallest of dents in farms breeding antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

© 2012 Off the Grid News

ShareTweetShareSend

Related Posts

The Secret Lives of Ticks: How They Find You and Natural Ways to Fight Back

The Secret Lives of Ticks: How They Find You and Natural Ways to Fight Back

by Bill Heid

It's a common experience to return from a day outdoors and discover a tick nestled in your skin or your...

How to Use Diatomaceous Earth This Spring As A Powerful Natural Insect Shield

How to Use Diatomaceous Earth This Spring As A Powerful Natural Insect Shield

by Bill Heid

When Spring Wakes Up… So Do The Bugs With longer days and warmer temperatures, spring brings a welcome burst of...

Getting Rid of Ladybugs Without Chemicals

Getting Rid of Ladybugs Without Chemicals

by Bill Heid

Dealing With Small Beetle Invasions It starts with one or two harmless specks on the window frame. At least, that’s...

Next Post
How To Care For Your Goats

How To Care For Your Goats

Please login to join discussion

YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

edible landscaping

Edible Landscaping For The Lazy Survival Gardener

Bees: The Easy Off-Grid Money Maker

Bees: The Easy Off-Grid Money Maker

Donald Trump Aims to Prove Seriousness of Presidential Bid by Invading Uzbekistan

Donald Trump Aims to Prove Seriousness of Presidential Bid by Invading Uzbekistan

TRENDING STORIES

  • bubonic plague

    Is Another Bubonic Plague Pandemic On The Horizon?

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Waco Fertilizer Plant Explosion & A Look Back On The “Waco Massacre”

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • Make Yourself 3 Times More Likely To Survive A Heart Attack

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • AI Surveillance Of Shoppers: Walmart’s Newest Tool To Grab Your Data

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0
  • ‘Apocalyptic’ Microchip Implants Are Here – And Being Inserted Into People’s Hands

    0 shares
    Share 0 Tweet 0

Subscribe to our Insider Newsletter

Huge discounts on off-the-grid gear and life saving supplements.






‘Off The Grid News’ is an independent, weekly email newsletter and website that is crammed full of practical information on living and surviving off the grid. Advice you’ll never hear from the mainstream media.

  • How-To
  • Grid Threats
  • Extreme Survival
  • Survival Gardening
  • Off-Grid Foods
  • Worldview
  • Natural Health
  • Survival Hunting
  • Privacy
  • Financial
  • Current Events
  • Self Defense
  • Home Defense
  • Pain-Free Living
  • Miscellaneous
  • Off Grid Videos

© Copyright 2025 Off The Grid News.  All Rights Reserved.

No Result
View All Result
  • How-To
  • Grid Threats
  • Survival
  • Gardening
  • Food
  • Worldview
  • Health
  • Privacy
  • Hunting
  • Defense
  • Financial
  • News
  • Misc
  • Videos

© Copyright 2025 Off The Grid News.  All Rights Reserved.