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Last week, the FDA released a report on the gross amount of antibiotics purchased by the livestock industry in 2012. The results are a bit startling. Between 2009 and 2012-a period of increasing awareness about the perils of antibiotic use in livestock facilities-the FDA found purchases of the drugs rose 16 percent. Over the same period, annual production of beef, chicken, and pork barely budged, suggesting that the industry was becoming more antibiotic-intensive each year. Worse still, the FDA deemed 61 percent of the antibiotics sold to the meat industry in 2012 as “medically important”-meaning that they’re commonly used in human medicine, and thus in danger of losing their effectiveness through resistance.

Late last year, after decades of foot shuffling, the FDA made its most decisive attempt ever to tamp down the meat industry’s habit of dosing livestock with antibiotics to make them grow faster-although being a rather timid warchdog, the FDA chose to make the rules voluntary.

The new report shows just how dire things had become: 70 percent of the “medically important” antimicrobials sold to meat producers in 2012 were destined to be administered through feed, and another 24 percent through water. Just 6 percent were meant to be used topically or through injection-the way small-scale farmers use antibiotics to treat sick animals. “If you talk to a veterinarian, they’ll tell you that if drugs are being used in feed, for the most part, they’re being used to promote growth or
prevent disease, not to treat an animal that’s known to be sick,” Keeve Nachman, who directs the Food Production and Public Health Program at Johns Hopkins’ Center for a Liveable Future, told me. Also, 97 percent of the drugs were sold without a prescription from a veterinarian-a practice that the 2013 rules intend to stop.

Even worse, as Keeve Nachman pointed out, sales of cephalosporins, a drug used to treat respiratory-tract infections, skin infections, and urinary-tract infections in people, rose about 4 percent between 2011 and 2012, even though the FDA had moved to scale backtheir use on January 4, 2012. That doesn’t exactly boost confidence.

Before I could fully digest these data, another email arrived in my inbox, this one from the meat-industry trade paper WATT Agribusiness, to which I subscribe. It contained an article sponsored by the ag-pharmaceutical giant Zoetis, titled “How do antibiotics promote growth?”