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The U.S. Food and Drug and Administration announced only days before Christmas that it has decided to back off a 34-year attempt to regulate the use of antibiotics in livestock feed for animals intended for human consumption, despite mounting scientific evidence that has linked the practice to the development of potentially fatal antibiotic-resistant superbugs in humans.

With no other notice aside from an obscure posting in the Federal Register on Dec. 22, the FDA declared it will now focus on encouraging “voluntary reform” within the industry instead of enforcing actual regulatory action, in addition to the “promotion of the judicious use of antimicrobials in the interest of public health.” The agricultural industry began administering livestock feed with small doses of antibiotics in the 1950s, not to treat sick animals, but to attack bacteria that animals’ would typically expend energy to fight off. Consuming low-levels of antibiotics allows livestock to fatten up faster and more efficiently, from a producers point of view.

The practice is often used by large-scale factory farmers, even though scientific literature dating from 1960s has connected it with the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that is hazardous to human health. The FDA acknowledged that risk in its original 1977 Notice of Opportunity for a Hearing to withdraw penicillin from animal feeds, where it warned that “animals that have received either subtherapeutic and/or therapeutic amounts of antibiotic and sulfonamide drugs in feeds may serve as a reservoir of antibiotic resistant pathogens and non-pathogens. These reservoirs of pathogens can produce human infections.”