According to the meat industry, the debate over legislation pending
in the House that would ban the use of sub-therapeutic doses of
antibiotics comes down to a simple “fact”: hog-farming on any scale
without sub-therapeutic use of antibiotics is impossible. The National
Pork Producers Council says so. The American Veterinary Medical Association says so. Heck, even GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa says so.

For the record, these folks also say that livestock producers don’t
really use 70% of all antibiotics distributed in the US as the Union of
Concerned Scientists estimates.
And you know what, we have no idea if they’re right. What many people
don’t realize is that antibiotic use by American livestock producers is
one of the best kept secrets on the planet. The UCS had to deduce that
number based on US sales of antibiotics combined with data from a
country that
does publish figures on antibiotics use
in livestock: Canada. That’s right. No one in the US, not the
government, not industry—no one—has any responsibility to tell
Americans how much antibiotics is actually in their meat. We’re just to
supposed to Take Industry’s Word For It that everything’s peachy.

Which is why the Danes insistence on being a part of this debate is
so important. Denmark is the largest hog producer in Europe and,
realizing the threat to public health posed by routinely feeding
healthy livestock antibiotics, they stopped doing it. Over a decade
ago. To listen to the AVMA and Chuck Grassley describe Denmark’s
experience, you’d think that Denmark’s hog industry went the way of New
York Harbor’s oyster beds—a happy, productive industry destroyed by
mismanagement. Except, insist the Danes, that just isn’t so. And they
keep saying it. First they testified at hearings in the House. They
said things like this:

[T]he discontinuation of non-therapeutic antibiotic use has not
negatively impacted long-term swine productivity in Denmark. The facts
outlined show that long-term swine production in Denmark has not been
negatively impacted by the ban on non-therapeutic antibiotic use.

And so as not to be misconstrued, they said every thing was fine
twice.
But pages of testimony along these lines were apparently not enough to
stop people from lying about the Danish record. The Danes, being a
hot-headed people, couldn’t stand it any longer. Recently, they met
with a Congressional delegation to show them a blistering PowerPoint
presentation that set the record straight. And then, as reported by Phil Brasher in the Des Moines Register, they wrote a letter [PDF].