Trump’s USDA Fights Global Guidelines on Livestock Antibiotics

The Trump administration is resisting the World Health Organization’s effort to sharply limit antibiotic use in farm animals, a move intended to help preserve the drugs’ effectiveness. Instead, the U.S. is helping draft an alternative approach that appears more favorable to agribusiness.

July 23, 2018 | Source: Bloomberg | by Andrew Martin

The Trump administration is resisting the World Health Organization’s effort to sharply limit antibiotic use in farm animals, a move intended to help preserve the drugs’ effectiveness.

Instead, the U.S. is helping draft an alternative approach that appears more favorable to agribusiness.

The WHO guidelines — released in November after two years of work by experts in infectious disease, veterinary medicine and microbiology — called for an end to giving medically important antibiotics routinely to healthy animals to promote growth or prevent disease. The United Nations agency said the drugs should be administered only to sick animals or healthy ones being raised near them, in the same flock, herd or fish population. Even then, drugs “critically important for human medicine” should not be used.

The Agriculture Department termed the effort shoddy science and one that the U.S. and other countries should have had a voice in developing. (The WHO kept country representatives out of the process to avoid potential conflicts.)