Thursday, August 22, 2013

Hurd dismisses concerns about antibiotics


Dr. Scott Hurd of Perdue University says the public has no reason to be concerned about the on-farm use of antibiotics as feed additives for chickens, hogs and cattle.

He says regular checking by federal government inspectors indicates that antibiotic residues in meats are rare; in fact, in poultry none have been detected in the last three years.

He says farmers are doing an excellent job of adhering to withdrawal times before they market their birds and livestock.

But residues are far from the major concern. The biggest concern is that the use of antibiotics as feed additives to improve feed efficiency and growth rates also greatly increases the presence of bacteria able to resist the antibiotics.

Once they develop that resistance, they can pass it to other bacteria, even without antibiotics being in the environment.

They can also pass along resistance to multiple bacteria.

The risk is that harmful bacteria, ones that give rise to life-threatening infections and illnesses, could pick up this antibiotic resistance and doctors would be severely limited in the medicines they can use to rescue patients.

Hurd made no comment about antibiotic resistance in his column.

I call this dissembling, which is misleading people while telling nothing but the truth. 

Hurd’s column will probably leave a lot of farmers thinking there are no risks to continuing to use antibiotics as growth promotants.