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Antibiotics and Farm Animals

Unless the meat and dairy products you buy at your local supermarket are labeled "organic," you can be fairly certain the animal your food came from was fed an abundance of antibiotics. In fact as an example, more than 70% of the antibiotics used in the United States is given to farm animals, largely to fatten them and to make them grow.

Why should this concern you? One of the problems is that bacteria become resistant to antibiotics through overexposure. It will require larger doses of an antibiotic to cure an infection caused by resistant bacteria; sometimes the antibiotic will not work at all.

The routine use of antibiotics on factory farms has been linked to increased incidence of antibiotic resistance in humans. The effectiveness of drugs that are needed to treat disease is being endangered. Therefore health experts are calling for cutbacks in the excessive use of drugs in farm animals.