“We produce nine billion food animals in the United States every
year. And most of these animals are fed antibiotics throughout
their life. And it’s the single greatest use of antibiotics in
the United States.” Lance Price, director of the TGen North
Center for Microbiomics and Human Health in Flagstaff, at the
ScienceWriters2011 conference on October 16th. “And then this is
the thing that just drives public health people crazy: most
antibiotics are fed to healthy animals to promote growth or to
prevent diseases that may be just occurring because of the way
we’re raising them. Overcrowding and unsanitary conditions—we
call them production diseases. And so we’re using these
lifesaving drugs as production tools. It’s pretty amazing. “So
most animals are raised in concentrated animal feeding
operations, or CAPOs. I could not honestly engineer a better
system for creating antibiotic-resistant bacteria than to
introduce antibiotics to this setting. And that’s exactly what
we do every day in the United States. If w