A History of FDA Inaction on Animal Antibiotics

April 4, 2012, 10:23 a.m. EDT

Update (April 11): The FDA announced new plans to limit the use of antibiotics in farm animals.

Three decades ago, the FDA determined that feeding antibiotics to healthy farm animals could be dangerous to human health and announced its intention to ban some drugs. But for years, calls for more research and pressure from an industry concerned with rising costs slowed any action. In response to a surge of scientific evidence linking the overuse of antibiotics in livestock to the spread of deadly drug-resistance in humans, a U.S. district court judge recently ordered the agency to take steps to restrict antibiotic-laced feed. Here we trace the history of the FDA's inaction on animal antibiotics.

U.S. Meat and Poultry Production

Sources: USDA, National Agricultural Statistics Service, Economic Research Service Livestock, Dairy, and Poultry Outlook Tables

Image Sources: USDA NRCS, Flickr

Latest Stories from ProPublica

Fossil Fuel Interests Are Working to Kill Solar in One Ohio County. The Hometown Newspaper Is Helping.

North Dakota’s Likely Next Governor Brushes Off Conflict Concerns, Says His Oil and Gas Ties Would Benefit the State

Election Skeptics Are Running Some County Election Boards in Georgia. A New Rule Could Allow Them to Exclude Decisive Votes.

ProPublica Expands Audience Team

Republish This Story for Free

Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Thank you for your interest in republishing this story. You are are free to republish it so long as you do the following:

You have to credit ProPublica and any co-reporting partners. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication(s).” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by ProPublica.” You must link the word “ProPublica” to the original URL of the story.
If you’re republishing online, you must link to the URL of this story on propublica.org, include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up language and link, and use our PixelPing tag.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the ProPublica URL. For more information about canonical metadata, refer to this Google SEO link.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
You cannot republish our photographs or illustrations without specific permission. Please contact [email protected].
It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories. You can’t state or imply that donations to your organization support ProPublica’s work.
You can’t sell our material separately or syndicate it. This includes publishing or syndicating our work on platforms or apps such as Apple News, Google News, etc.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. (To inquire about syndication or licensing opportunities, contact [email protected].)
You can’t use our work to populate a website designed to improve rankings on search engines or solely to gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
We do not generally permit translation of our stories into another language.
Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you.
If you share republished stories on social media, we’d appreciate being tagged in your posts. We have official accounts for ProPublica on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Copy and paste the following into your page to republish:

Current site Current page