As a Monsanto lawyer, Michael Taylor wrote a memo outlining the strategy Monsanto would use to sue farmers who wanted to advertise the fact that they didn’t use Monsanto’s genetically engineered growth hormone by labeling their milk as "rBGH-free." Later, as an FDA regulator, he pushed Monsanto’s rBGH through an approval process he created and crafted a policy that requires hormone-free dairy farmers to put a disclaimer on their product noting that, according to the FDA, there’s no difference between natural milk and milk produced with the use of rBGH.

One of the many problems caused by the use of rBGH is that when cows are artificially forced to over-produce milk, their udders swell and become infected with mastitis, requiring farmers to employ a wide variety of antibiotics (many of which are rarely tested for in milk) in an attempt to control the infections. The General Accounting office warned the FDA in 1993 not to approve rBGH for this very reason – fearing increased antibiotic residues in rBGH-derived milk and dairy products.

A far larger problem than antibiotic residues in milk however is the routine lacing of antibiotics (80% of all antibiotics in the U.S. are given to animals to make them grow faster, not to humans to make them recover from infections or disease) in animal feed on America’s factory farms. This force-feeding of antibiotics in industrial agriculture (banned on organic farms and all farms in the EU), combined with doctors’ over-prescribing antibiotics to their human patients, has turned into a major public health issue, with animal and human pathogens steadily developing resistance to antibiotics.

Since 1993, when rBGH was approved, and more importantly when the feeding of antibiotics to animals on factory farms skyrocketed, the number of people dying from infections acquired in hospitals in the United States jumped from 13,000 to 100,000 per year. Faced with this massive, but reversible, public health crisis, the FDA has done absolutely nothing.

Take Action to Keep Antibiotics Working for People – Not Factory Farms!