The Food and Drug Administration is demonstrating a stunning lack of forethought by preparing to approve a new antibiotic to treat a pneumonia-like disease in cattle, despite warnings from health groups and a majority of the agency's own expert advisers that the decision will be dangerous -- for people.
The drug, cefquinome, is one of a class of highly potent antibiotics that are among medicine's last defense against several serious human infections. No drug from that class has ever been approved in the United States for use in animals.
The American Medical Association and about a dozen other health groups have warned the FDA that giving cefquinome to animals would speed the emergence of microbes resistant to that important class of antibiotics, as has happened with other drugs. Those supermicrobes could then spread to people and kill them.
Echoing those concerns, the FDA's advisory board last fall voted to reject the request by InterVet Inc. of Millsboro, Del., to market the drug for cattle.
Yet by all indications, the FDA will approve cefquinome this spring. That outcome is all but required, officials said, by a recently implemented "guidance document" that codifies how to weigh threats to human health posed by proposed new animal drugs.
I am astonished at the sheer unadulterated stupidity and callous disregard for human health by the FDA by giving in to large corporate interests yet again! If food animals were not overcrowded on factory farms in the first place, there would be no need to routinetly medicate them with antibiotics in their feed because these animals would not act as breeding vessels for dangerous diseases. If food animals were cared for properly and humanely, we would not be breeding multiply drug resistant microbes that threaten to rampage unchecked through the human population. How many times does this situation have to repeat itself before the FDA finally learns that corporate interests are our own worst enemy?
Cefquinome Sulphate:
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This is not going to be the first or the last time they do this.
Think of the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA): it shifted all burden of proof to the FDA, so people can now market their sketchy supplements without running proper safety testing, as it is up to the FDA to run those if the FDA wants to persecute them.
Then one wonders where all these multiresistant bugs come from...
It will probably take the death by resistant microbe of a famous and powerful politician. Even politicians will probably choose their own lives over money. Most of the time.
While I agree that giving animals antibiotics that are normally used on humans is a bad idea... a recent study might mean that the point is moot. In the study, chickens raised in an antibiotic free environment still had antibiotic resistant bacteria. IMHO, it's population density of the animals that's causing fast spread of resistance genes that already exist in the bacterial population. The USDA's research s generally reliable, but I don't know how long this study lasted.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/03/070307152722.htm