No monitoring equals no evidence

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

The venerable Wall Street Journal and Meatingplace.com had very different takes on a report published recently on the monitoring of antibiotic use in livestock production written by The United States Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

The Wall Street Journal reported that federal officials are doing a poor job of monitoring how antibiotics are used by livestock producers, making it impossible to properly examine the development of bacterial resistance to the drugs and the impact on Americans. 

"Without detailed use data and representative resistance data, agencies cannot examine trends and understand the relationship between use and resistance," the GAO concluded.
A headline on a story by Meatingplace.com, an online magazine for the meat industry, read "GAO can't find link between antibiotic use in food animals and human resistance."

The story said the GAO report concluded that there isn't sufficient data to study a link between antibiotic use in food animals and antibiotic resistance in humans. "Not only is there no scientific study linking antibiotic use in food animals to antibiotic resistance in humans, as the U.S. pork industry has continually pointed out, there isn't even adequate data to conduct a study," National Pork Producers Council president Doug Wolf said in a news release in response to the report.

The backdrop to this report is the efforts in the U.S. Congress to restrict use of antibiotics in food animals. BF