[meany]

At least in the US there has been recent progress on this. The USDA just released new rules on June 11, 2023.

https://extension.umn.edu/news/over-counter-livestock-antibi...

Starting June 11, 2023, all currently available over-the-counter antibiotics for livestock will be available only as prescription medications. This new rule will impact all livestock species. Over-the-counter antibiotics are moving to prescription only to provide more veterinary oversight. Similar to the Veterinary Feed Directive, placing antibiotics under the supervision of veterinarians should result in more judicious use and less antibiotic resistance.

This change includes but is not limited to the following: Penicillin, Oxytetracycline, Sulfa antibiotics and Mastitis tubes. Some medications are not considered crucial for human medicine and will remain over-the-counter. This includes the following: Ionophores including Rumensin and Bovatec, Parasiticides, such as Ivermectin, Oral pre/pro/postbiotics, and topical non-antibiotic treatments.

Livestock producers must have a valid Veterinary-Client-Patient Relationship (VCPR) in place before they can be prescribed antibiotics by a veterinarian. A VCPR is a working relationship between a veterinarian (veterinary clinic) and a client. Ideally, a VCPR is a documented agreement between both parties that includes a dedicated visit to the animal location(s) the client operates. This visit and documentation must occur at least once every year to maintain the VCPR.

[GeekyBear]

The issue isn't so much antibiotics given to sick animals to make them well, it's the fact that adding a constant low dose of antibiotics to animal feed allows those animals to more efficiently convert feed into tasty, tasty muscle mass.

> Antibiotics are chemotherapeutic agents used for the clinical management of infectious diseases in humans, plants and animals. However a sizeable fraction of antibiotics produced every year all over the world is used for non-therapeutic purposes. In US alone, about 24.6 million pounds of antibiotics are used in animal agriculture annually and a substantial portion of this is used as growth promoters and not for the treatment of infections...

Evidences available in the literature speak volumes on the beneficial effects obtained from antibiotics used as a feed additive. Pigs supplemented with antibiotics in their feed require 10–15% less feed to achieve a desired level of growth.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2014.0033...

Constantly feeding antibiotics to animals makes factory farms more profitable.

[quietpain]

I thought that antibiotics would have a detrimental effect on an animal’s growth since it wreaks havoc with the intestinal ecosystem.

Has there been any research to determine why growth improves with diminished gut bacteria?

[GeekyBear]

Adding a constant stream of antibiotics to animal feed to promote faster growth has been common practice since the 1940's.

I've seen some theories tossed around to explain the mechanism, but there is no consensus, aside from the fact that it does work.

Unfortunately, it's also led to us having human disease that no longer responds well to antibiotics that are safe to use in humans.

For instance, with Extensively Drug Resistant Tuberculosis:

> Second-line drugs are more toxic than the standard anti-TB regimen and can cause a range of serious side-effects including hepatitis, depression, hallucinations, and deafness. Patients are often hospitalized for long periods, in isolation. In addition, second-line drugs are extremely expensive compared with the cost of drugs for standard TB treatment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensively_drug-resistant_tub...

Even after you fall back on lesser used antibiotics with severe side effects, the cure rate for XDR TB is below 40%.

[heavyset_go]

Anyone can go on Alibaba and buy 55-gallon drums of pure antibiotics at a fraction of a fraction of a cent per dose.

[KennyBlanken]

This is progress but still drastically short of EU regs where livestock/poultry are subject to stricter vaccination requirements. For example, vaccination for salmonella.

In the US, poultry industry and federal/state governments have spent endless effort "programming" people to think that it's their responsibility if they get sick because the meat or eggs they purchased were contaminated and they didn't take enough preventative steps (like cooking it to the point of it being nearly inedible.)

Most US poultry is rinsed in chlorinated water, eggs are washed as well (which ends up destroying the egg's natural coating, so they have to be refrigerated) and so on.

[jimbob45]

Is cross contamination just not a thing in Europe then?

[danielheath]

If you vaccinate the entire flock, none of them end up with salmonella.

Not washing the eggs means the outside might have some chicken crap on it, but A) you wash that off before breaking the egg, and B) you're cooking anything the eggshells come into contact with.

[lettergram]

People in the US also think they need to refrigerate eggs.

I personally want zero medicine, chemicals or vaccines in my food. It’s frankly gross.

Further, it is your fault if you eat bad meat. We have a responsibility for our own bodies and what we put in them. The fact people can sue is why they wash with bleach.

[macNchz]

> People in the US also think they need to refrigerate eggs.

Eggs in the US are washed (by law) before sale, which removes their natural protective coating, therefore requiring they be refrigerated. In other places eggs are sold unwashed and can be left out.

[lettergram]

Take a step back and think about what you just said...

"Washing them, removes the protective coating, requiring refrigeration"

Right, so why do they require refrigeration, if they are sanitized?

Further, if they're not sanitized, you can leave them out? What exactly is that protective coating and how does it somehow make the eggs less safe to sanitize them?

https://tellus.ars.usda.gov/stories/articles/how-we-store-ou...

US eggs are fine to leave out, they just lose some moisture. That's also true of the ones which are unwashed btw, but washed eggs degrade faster. Both unwashed and washed are better refrigerated.

[RoyalHenOil]

This study was focused on the US egg export market, so they were looking at moisture loss, which affects how "fresh" an egg looks and tastes, but they did not look at the rate that eggs go bad. Egg exporters don't sell rotten eggs -- that's the consumer's problem -- so that fell outside the scope of the study.

The theory is that sanitizing process makes the shell more permeable, which makes it easier for random bacteria in the environment to infect the egg; thus it risks going rotten faster. Refrigeration slows down the growth of these microbes, thus counteracting the increase in permability.

[macNchz]

As I understand it, washing reduces the presence of salmonella on the outside of the egg (which is less of a concern in Europe where vaccination against it is more common). It’s a tradeoff though, as it makes the egg more permeable and therefore susceptible to other spoilage microbes, since the eggs don’t stay in a sterile environment after being washed.

[ClumsyPilot]

> it is your fault if you eat bad meat

I could take a piece of meat way past ita expiration date, bleach it in hydrogen peroxide, and sell it to you as fresh, and you would never know.

Thats what food industry does. https://active-oxygens.evonik.com/en/markets/food-and-bevera...

[Broken_Hippo]

People in the US also think they need to refrigerate eggs

Only folks that care about food safety. Refrigeration is sometimes cultural: Folks in Norway usually refrigerate eggs, even though they look unwashed, but eggs sit on a shelf at stores in Sweden.

I personally want zero medicine, chemicals or vaccines in my food. It’s frankly gross. So don't eat. Everything has chemicals. You probably don't want to eat sick animals (that's what medicine is for) and vaccines help make sure your food is safer - especially for salmonella. Or produce all of your own food. Good luck grinding wheat, canning and avoiding botulism, feeding animals (or farming even more), and not dying when food runs out.

Further, it is your fault if you eat bad meat. We have a responsibility for our own bodies and what we put in them. The fact people can sue is why they wash with bleach.

This is a horrible misunderstanding of what you have control over. You can handle all meat properly and still get sick: Unvaccinated chickens tend to have salmonella, for example, and it can make you sick. You simply can't see whether or not the spinach you are eating is contaminated by animal droppings either. You don't - and never will - have control over everything you put in your body.

They don't wash with bleach because people can sue: They wash with bleach because they aren't taking other measures to make sure your eggs are safer and because some cultures will reject food if it has little bits of poop and feathers on the shell.

[xii23]

>it is your fault if you eat bad meat

How would you know you're eating bad meat?

[lettergram]

lol ugh... leave your meat out for a day or two and circle back.

[kevin_thibedeau]

It may just be the starter for a new cured meat.

[_Algernon_]

If you only eat food without chemicals, you'll never eat again.

[lettergram]

As someone who operates a farm, it’s BS. What this really attempts to do, is force me to hire some licensed person to tell me what I already know. Worse, vets are overloaded and there are shortages.

So I have to pay $500 to get some vet to come out in 1-2 days, to tell me what I already know. In that time, my cattle can die, it can spread all costing me more and benefiting no one. Further, because I can only sell a head for $750-2000 this basically wipes out any potential profit.

This is basically just helping the big players who keep a vet on staff or in a high concentrated area. Most of the small farms in my area are just going to get screwed.

Finally, I’m curious how much evidence there is animals use of antibiotics impact humans. Most diseases don’t spread from animal to human, so I don’t suspect it’s all that impactful. On the other hand, it could be to reduce animal-to-animal diseases. That would make sense.

All that being said, to be honest, I think this is an effort to limit the things we saw during Covid. Basically, people realized they could get any drugs for animals cheap and easy. It’s screwing up the medical system, making it as cheap as drugs in the rest of the world.

[rstuart4133]

Actually, what it's attempting to do is prevent antibiotic being used as growth promoters. If they were only used on animals that are sick it would not be a problem. As it is, it's a serious problem as the sibling comment points out.

But, the net effect is what you say. What other solutions are there? Tax them so other uses aren't economic, perhaps?

[heavyset_go]

> Finally, I’m curious how much evidence there is animals use of antibiotics impact humans.

There's a ton, and it all points to antibiotic overuse in agriculture as the main culprit.

Antibiotics and their metabolites don't just stay in animals, they exist in their waste and percolate throughout the environment, water supply, etc, causing antibiotic resistance in bacteria in the environment.

Antibiotic resistance in bacteria is mainly from misuse in humans and animals, and disease spread between the two, along with ineffective waste treatment and the leaching of antibiotics into the environment[1]. About 80% of antibiotics sold in the US are used in agriculture[2], where they are given to animals not to treat infections, but to prevent them and to stimulate growth.

Here are some diagrams from the CDC[3][4], and some articles[5][6][7] from the CDC.

> Most diseases don’t spread from animal to human, so I don’t suspect it’s all that impactful.

Over 60% of infectious diseases in humans are spread from animals, and 75% of new diseases in humans are spread from animals[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_resistance

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4638249/

[3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Antibiot...

[4] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Antibiot...

[5] https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/food.html

[6] https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/challenges/antibiotic-resista...

[7] https://www.cdc.gov/drugresistance/environment.html

[8] https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/basics/zoonotic-diseases.html

[cm2187]

I presume there is a chance the harm can be undone. As antibiotics are less used, the few resistant bacteria will compete with the many non resistant bacteria and hopefully go extinct.

[RoyalHenOil]

Extinction is unlikely, unless having resistance comes at a very high cost to the organism. I would not necessarily assume this is the case, though. These are genes that may have already existed in a subset of these bacteria, just as random genetic variation, and then we came along and selectively bred the ones with a natural resistance to our antibiotics.

Think of it like the black death in humans. When this disease suddenly made the jump to humans, some people had naturally higher resistance and some had lower resistance, all just due to random genetic variation. The disease spared people who were more resistant and killed people who were less resistant, and now humans today carry genes that protect us from this disease, even though we have not had another black plague for hundreds of years. Even if we eradicated the disease entirely, we will probably still carry resistance for thousands of years. It's just a part of our genetic makeup now.

Back to bacteria, even if antibiotic resistance does come at a high cost to the organism and there is selective pressure against it in the absence of antibiotics, it is still very unlikely that we can get back to the way it was when antiobiotics were new. Once a deleterious trait appears in a population, it has a way of sticking around (e.g., see numerous deadly genetic diseases carried by humans).

Basically, the cat is out of the bag. We need to drastically reduce our use of modern antibiotics to buy ourselves time to develop new antibiotics--and we need to keep the new antibiotics very tightly controlled.

[cm2187]

But my point is that if you cease to apply a selective pressure, suddenly the organism that were suppressed by this selective pressure thrive. Whereas in the case of the back death the pressure didn't disappear, we just developed a resistance (if that's the case).