Seeking National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria

In 2015, the Obama administration released a National Action Plan for Combating Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria, to address the public health crisis of increasing antibiotic resistance.

Farmed animals in the United States are regularly given antibiotics for a wide variety of reasons, such as to prevent disease from spreading in the cramped and unsanitary environments in which the animals are raised, and to increase the animals’ growth. This use has been widely criticized as a leading cause of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, causing critical life-saving drugs to lose their effectiveness in human medicine.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund has long advocated for tighter federal regulation of antibiotic use on farms. Because the use of antibiotics in animal agriculture–a critical contributor to antibiotic resistance–was all but ignored in the National Action Plan, we sent a “Freedom request to the federal agencies involved with creating and implementing the Plan, to find out why.

The records we requested have helped us illuminate the link between antibiotics in farmed animals and human health, a connection increasingly coming under serious public scrutiny.

The Animal Legal Defense Fund continues to sound the alarm bell, and urges the Food and Drug Administration and United States Department of Agriculture to take action.