New Ad Campaign Wonders “Who’s Hogging Our Antibiotics?”

Commuters and visitors in Washington, D.C., metro stations are being asked, “Who’s Hogging Our Antibiotics?” in a new ad campaign featuring pigs in a trough. The series of ads by the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming is apparently part of the project’s national effort to end what it claims is the misuse of antibiotics in food animal production. The campaign asserts that up to 70 percent of human antibiotics are fed to factory-farm animals that aren’t sick, a practice leading medical groups allege promotes development of deadly strains of drug-resistant bacteria that can spread to humans.

“Human antibiotics are routinely misused on industrial farms to compensate for crowded, stressful and unsanitary conditions,” said Laura Rogers, a project director with the Pew Health Group. “The way we are raising our food animals is putting human health at risk.” Versions of the ads will also reportedly appear soon online and in newspapers on Capitol Hill. See Pew Charitable Trusts News Release, June 3, 2009.