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Pork producers take issue with Consumer Reports antibiotic article

The National Pork Producers Council (NPPC) says calls for food-animal farmers to stop using antibiotics to prevent diseases are ill-advised and wrong.  The statement is in reaction to a Consumer Reports article released Wednesday saying that antibiotics are the most inappropriately employed in the meat and poultry industries.

Dave Warner with the NPPC says pig farmers are progressive and responsible in treating sick livestock.

“Certainly better and more targeted use of antibiotics to keep animals healthy is something that is one of the priorities of pork producers,” Warner told Brownfield Ag News Wednesday.

Warner says the use of antibiotics to promote growth in hogs will be banned within a couple of years.  He also says producers participate in pork industry-developed programs that include responsible antibiotic use.

“We have done the most over the past 30 years to make sure we aren’t part of the problem, or to address the issue,” said Warner, “yet we’re continually being attacked by others.”

The NPPC statement says there is no conclusive scientific evidence linking antibiotics use in food-animal production with antibiotic treatment failures in people. Numerous peer-reviewed risk assessments, including at least one from FDA, have shown a “negligible” risk to human health of antibiotics use in livestock and poultry production, says the statement.

At best, says the NPPC statement, the science on antibiotic resistance is incomplete, and a recent Centers for Disease Control report on the subject focused on overuse of antibiotics in human medicine, mentioning animal use of antibiotics only six times in its 113 pages.

To deny livestock producers antibiotics would be unethical, says the NPPC statement, leading to animal suffering and possibly death, and could compromise the nation’s food system.

AUDIO: Dave Warner (8 min. MP3)