80% of antibiotics given in US go to animals
Just catching up on things after my long winter nap... Three weeks ago, FDA reported that 29 millions pounds of antibiotics were used in livestock production in the US. How does that compare to human use? A new estimate for human use is 7 million pounds. Thus, almost 80% of antibiotic use is in food production. One caveat, it appears this estimate was derived from IMS sales data for selected antibacterial drugs and I'm not sure how accurate those figures are. Early estimates were closer to 70%. With all of the antibiotic stewardship efforts both in hospital and through education of primary care physicians and patients, you wonder how effective these efforts could possibly be? If by magic, we could reduce antibiotic exposure in human populations by 50% that would still leave 90% of the actual antibiotic exposure burden untouched. The funny thing is, bacteria don't care if the antibiotic they are exposed to was ingested by a human or an animal...
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