This poor animal is still alive. Downers are common in factory farms.
WASHINGTON D.C.––The U.S. Food & Drug Administration on December 11, 2013 announced that the drug makers Zoetis and Elanco, which produce the majority of antibiotics used to promote livestock growth, have agreed to participate in a voluntary phase-out of non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in animal husbandry.
Routine antibiotic doses promote faster growth by suppressing infections that often result from housing large numbers of animals in close proximity under unsanitary conditions.
“This is the agency’s first serious attempt in decades to curb what experts have long regarded as the systematic overuse of antibiotics in healthy farm animals, with the drugs typically added directly into their feed and water,” assessed Sabrina Tavernese of The New York Times. “The waning effectiveness of antibiotics has become a looming threat to public health. At least two million Americans fall sick every year and about 23,000 die from antibiotic-resistant infections,” according to data published in September 2013 by the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention.
The FDA has asked antibiotic manufacturers to require that antibiotics be sold only to customers who present a veterinary prescription.
New York Congressional Representative Louise M. Slaughter, who has long sought to regulate farm use of antibiotics, warned that the prescription procedure can easily be abused. Slaughter reminded media that antibiotic use by European Union agribusiness declined only after nations led by the Netherlands introduced limits on total antibiotic use, enforced by fines for noncompliance.
SOURCE: ANIMAL PEOPLE, November/December 2013:
