Environmental Group Contends FDA Documents Show Doubts re: Antimicrobial Drugs
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) has posted to its website documents relating to the use of antimicrobial drugs in livestock feed received from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) under a Freedom of Information Act request. According to PEER, internal memos show that FDA is not, as the agency has claimed, working successfully with industry to phase out this use of antimicrobials, estimated at 30 million pounds in feed troughs annually. PEER claims that “70,000 Americans die each year from drug-resistant infections” and that the “rise of drug-resistant ‘super diseases’ is driven by overuse and misuse of antimicrobial drugs in livestock feed primarily to promote livestock growth.”
In litigation, FDA defended its failure to timely follow through on proceedings
to withdraw from use two antimicrobials by claiming that it had abandoned
formal rulemaking in favor of more effective voluntary measures. Details
about a court order requiring that FDA initiate withdrawal proceedings
appear in Issue 432 of this Update. According to agency documents, one
strategy memo states, “We recognized that the voluntary strategy has certain
limitations in that (1) it lacks specifically defined/mandated timeframes; (2)
its success is dependent on drug sponsors deciding it is in their best interest to work cooperatively with the agency; and (3) FDA collects insufficient data on drug use . . . to measure the effectiveness of the strategy.” See PEER Press
Release, October 17, 2012.
