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Nearly 80 percent of antibiotics consumed in the United States go to livestock farms. Meanwhile, antibiotic-resistant pathogens affecting people are on the rise. Is there a connection here? No need for alarm, insists the National Pork Producers Council. Existing regulations “provide adequate safeguards against antibiotic resistance,” the group insists on its site.  It even enlists the Centers for Disease Control in its effort to show that “animal antibiotic use is safe for everyone,” claiming that the CDC has found “no proven link to antibiotic treatment failure in humans due to antibiotic use in animals.”

So move along, nothing to see here, right? Not so fast. On Monday, the CDC came out with a new report called “Antibiotic resistance threats in the United States, 2013,” available here.  And far from exonerating the meat industry and its voracious appetite for drugs, the report spotlights it as a driver of resistance. Check out the left side of this infographic drawn from the report:    

Note the text on the bottom: “These drugs should be only used to treat infections.” Compare that to the National Pork Producers Council’s much more expansive conception of proper uses of antibiotics in livestock facilities: “treatment of illness, prevention of disease, control of disease, and nutritional efficiency of animals.” Dosing animals with daily hits of antibiotics to prevent disease only makes sense, of course, if you’re keeping animals on an industrial scale.