GAO Report Calls for Risk Assessment, Not Legislation, to Manage Use of Antibiotics for Animals 5/24/2004
From: Ron Phillips of the Animal Health Institute, 202-662-4130 WASHINGTON, May 24 -- A new report by the General Accounting Office on the use of antibiotics in food animals recommends the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) expedite risk assessments "to determine if regulatory action is necessary." "Risk assessment on specific drug/disease combinations is the proper way to assess the need for regulatory action," said Animal Health Institute (AHI) President and CEO Alexander S. Mathews. It is encouraging that risk assessments done to date show antibiotic use in animals poses a very low risk to human health." Mathews cited a published, peer-reviewed article in the May 3 edition of the Journal of Food Protection, reporting that a risk assessment for two macrolide antibiotics show their use poses "an extremely low risk" of a person eating beef, poultry or pork acquiring a resistance infection that is untreatable with a macrolide antibiotic. In addition, authors of a peer-reviewed article in the January, 2004 issue of the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy examined more than 250 studies and available data and concluded there is no scientific evidence to suggest that the use of antibiotics in food animals negatively impacts human health. Included in the paper was a list of several risk assessments that have been done on specific antibiotics use in animals, consistently showing very low levels of risk. "It is important to note the GAO report does not recommend enactment of legislation to ban classes of antibiotics," said Mathews. "Such an approach would be similar to what was done in Europe, where a ban of so-called growth promoting antibiotics was enacted without risk assessment, leading to significant increases in animal disease." The second recommendation in the GAO report calls for HHS and USDA to implement a plan for collecting data on antibiotic use, and to use the data to support research on the link between a particular antibiotic and emerging resistant bacteria. Critical to such an effort is robust, adequate surveillance data on resistant bacteria on the farm, in processing plants and in the human population. Ironically, FDA has reduced funding for surveillance data on food animals, and has yet to publicly support an important new program at USDA that uses antibiotic use data and surveillance data together to help producers make better decisions about antibiotic use. "Data on antibiotic use alone does nothing to inform management decisions without surveillance data that provides information about the impacts of that use," said Mathews. "Congress should provide more funding for surveillance in general, and FDA should be bolstering, not cutting, the funding available for tracking the emergence of resistant bacteria in animal samples." ------ AHI represents the companies that manufacture animal health products -- the pharmaceuticals, vaccines and feed additives used in modern food production, and the medicines that keep pets healthy. |