Oregon could become the first state in the country to regulate agricultural use of antibiotics, should lawmakers approve bills that would prohibit giving antibiotics to healthy farm animals and require factory farms to report how the drugs are used in their operations.

More than 70 percent of antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used on livestock and poultry—and not primarily to treat sick animals. Instead, factory farms often put antibiotics into the daily feed and water of healthy animals, to promote growth and prevent disease due to overcrowded and dirty conditions.

As a result, bacteria commonly present on farms are mutating into stronger, antibiotic-resistant strains, which in turn find their way to the human population through numerous pathways, including contaminated food, airborne dust blowing off farms, and water and soil polluted with contaminated feces.

“There is a near consensus among public health experts that the bulk antibiotics produced by [the animal pharmaceutical industry] are accelerating the approach of a post-antibiotics nightmare scenario, in which superbugs routinely emerge from our farms and wreak havoc on a human population living among the ruins of modern medicine,” Alexander Zaitchick wrote at Salon last year.

Those experts range from the World Health Organization and the Infectious Diseases Society of America to the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, all of which signed onto a 2011 letter stating that “the evidence is so strong of a link between misuse of antibiotics in food animals and human antibiotic resistance that FDA and Congress should be acting much more boldly and urgently to protect these vital drugs for human illness.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that at least 2 million Americans become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections.

The bills in Oregon, which have gained the support of medical providers, local food advocates, and consumer rights watchdogs, aim to curtail such antibiotic overuse and its dangerous consequences.