“Eighty percent of the antibiotics in this country are fed to livestock.”
Rep. Louise Slaughter on Oct. 9, 2013, in an interview on MSNBC
A salmonella outbreak traced to California chicken processing plants recently prompted Rep. Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., to raise a pet issue on MSNBC: antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
The federal shutdown was limiting government’s ability to track infection, she said. But then she pointed to a deeper issue: “the overuse and ruination of antibiotics.”
An advocate for tougher requirements for farm use of such drugs, Slaughter told host Joy-Ann Reid that she’s been “trying to save antibiotics for persons — for human beings.”
“Eighty percent of the antibiotics in this country are fed to livestock every single day, and it’s creating a terrible problem of resistant bacteria,” she said.
Do livestock consume the bulk of the nation’s antimicrobial drugs?
It’s an important question, because according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wide use of antibiotics in food-producing animals “contributes to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in food-producing animals.”
That means if you get infected with bacteria from the food you eat, it might be harder to fight that infection with antibiotics. Drug resistance may be contributing to higher hospitalization rates in the recent salmonella outbreak, for example, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The 80 percent number has been a popular talking point since 2010 among those who advocate for restricting use of antibiotics on farms. That’s the year the Food and Drug Administration released newly required data on sales of antibiotics by manufacturers for food-producing animals. The FDA didn’t release sales information on antibiotics for human use, but pointed to national projections from IMS Health, a company that compiles proprietary health data.
The numbers let folks compare the millions of kilograms of drugs sold by manufacturers for use by food-producing animals (13.1 million kilograms) in 2009 with those sold for use by people (3.3 million kilograms). The 13.1 million kilograms of antibiotics sold for animals was 80 percent of the total amount of drugs sold for both humans and animals, which was 16.4 million kilograms.
We should note this comparison doesn’t account for all antibiotics (such as those for household pets) sold in the U.S.
A researcher with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health’s Center for a Livable Future first did the math for a 2010 blog post that’s been widely cited. (The most recent reports reveal a similar proportion, as calculated by the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming.)
Pharmaceutical company lobby groups such as the Animal Health Institute, though, have cried foul. It says the number is “wrong and misleading, for several reasons,” and cites the FDA.
The FDA has indeed offered a “caution regarding comparisons of human and animal antibacterial drug sales data.” It repeated some of those cautions in a 2012 letter to Slaughter.
But while it offers a series of caveats about drawing “definite conclusions” from “direct comparisons” about the drug sales data — such as differences in dosages between different drugs and in the sizes of human and animal populations — it confirms both sets of sales data essentially measure the same thing.
Both show the volume of antibacterial drugs, by weight, being sold to various outlets from the manufacturer.
There are plenty of limits, as the FDA points out, on the usefulness of the publicly released sales data to inform public policy. They don’t illuminate why animals get the drugs. They don’t specify how the antibiotics are administered.
The industry uses the lack of detail to downplay the statistic’s usefulness, even as it fights efforts to gather and release more information.
Sales data is “not at all useful for understanding the benefits or the risks of using antibiotics to keep animals healthy,” Ron Phillips of the Animal Health Institute told PolitiFact.
But others argue that the data is actually quite revealing.
“There is some uncertainty in these data, but not enough to escape the fact that the vast majority of antibiotics in this country are used in food animals, not to treat sick people,” wrote Robert Lawrence, a doctor who directs the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins.
Our ruling
Slaughter said “80 percent of the antibiotics in this country are fed to livestock.”
The statistic comes from a comparison of FDA sales data for food-producing animals and private sales data for humans — not all antibiotics sold in the U.S. A letter from the FDA to the congresswoman confirms that most of the drugs for livestock are consumed in food and water. That means the percentage “fed” to animals may not be quite as high as 80 percent, though it would be close.
Slaughter could have said more clearly that of all the antibiotics sold for use by people and livestock, 80 percent are for animals. But she was close. We rate her statement Mostly True.
