US campaign: Moms for antibiotic awareness

The campaign is set up to help raise awareness about a pending federal bill (PAMTA, H.R. 965), gaining bipartisan support, which could reduce exposure to antiboitics from food sources, which come from overuse of antibiotics in livestock farming.

 

Approval of the federal bill would withdraw the routine use of seven classes of antibiotics important to human health from food-animal production unless animals or herds are sick with disease or unless drug companies can prove that their use does not harm human health.

 

The Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming’s Moms for Antibiotic Awareness is a group of mothers and others who are advocating for the reduction of antibiotic-resistant bacteria through phasing out the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in food animal production.

 

The campaign is also supported by Chipotle restaurant owner Steve Ells who proved that it is possible to be successful using antibiotic-free ingredients from his first location near University of Denver to the thousands of Chipotle restaurants located across the country, 18 years later.

 

Chipotle is the only restaurant of its type to use meat, pork and poultry raised with no antibiotics and no hormones (meat and dairy hormones). Despite Ells’ success the food industry has been slow to use his company as a model.

 

The concept of antibiotic-free meat, poultry and pork has been around for some time, but the conventional meat and poultry industry in the US has put up tall fences to prevent regulation.

 

Some 70 percent of the antibiotics in use in the United States are used not on humans, but on cattle without a disease diagnose.

 

Many large producers of meat and poultry feed these drugs – more than 11,000 tonnes of them a year, according to the Food and Drug Administration – to their healthy food animals to promote faster growth and to offset the effects of overcrowding and poor sanitation.