Animal ag publications need not be the ag industry’s own worst enemy

Sometimes ag publications are the industry’s worst enemy. Bloomberg News published an article August 5, 2016, about vaccines becoming a bigger player in animal health, helping to lower the use of antibiotics used in animals raised for food. Beef Producer copied it word for word in its August 9, 2016, edition. It does not exactly state the truth, and implies that deaths from antibiotic resistant bacteria stem from animal ag use of the products. Some quotes follow from the article. “Farm animals are fed about 80 percent of the antibiotics in the U.S. which make their way into the human body.”  What makes its way into my body, the animals or the antibiotics? 82 percent of the antibiotics fed to animals are never or very rarely are used in human medicine. In fact, tetracyclines are the only antibiotics used in human medicine that are represented in the 82 percent number.  The sales of tetracyclines in human health comprise only 3 percent of all sales in human medicine and certainly are not big guns in the fight against the super-bugs.  The 82 percent number also represents sales for companion animals like horses, cats and dogs, as footnoted on every graph and table on the FDA’s annual sales reports...... Your antagonists can sit back, smile and take the week off. Your publications are doing their work for them.