The prime choice to make with beef
by Hannah Lacasse, U.S. PIRG Antibiotics Program Digital Campaigner
Even though summer is coming to a close and it’s getting a little chilly in some places for barbecues with family and friends, it’s not too late to start choosing responsibly-raised meat. Many people crave a good burger, no matter the season. Here’s why you should choose meat raised without routine antibiotic use for your next cookout.
Despite how vital antibiotics are to public health, approximately 70 percent of the antibiotics important to human medicine sold in the United States go to the meat industry — not people. Meat producers give animals that aren’t sick these medicines routinely to compensate for crowded and unsanitary conditions. This misuse is breeding bacteria resistant to antibiotics, the foundations of modern medicine.
U.S. PIRG and its partners in the Antibiotics Off the Menu Coalition have made great progress in encouraging the chicken industry to stop its longstanding antibiotic misuse. Over the past few years, several major restaurant chains have committed to serving chicken raised without routine antibiotic use. We estimate that half the chicken produced in the U.S. will soon be raised without the misuse of medically-important antibiotics.
But the biggest purchasers of antibiotics in the U.S. meat industry continue to lag behind. Together, the beef and pork industry account for 80 percent of antibiotics sold to U.S. meat producers. It’s time for beef and pork producers to catch up to the poultry industry.
The way food is produced shouldn’t put our health at risk. In March 2018, romaine lettuce contaminated with a strain of antibiotic-resistant E. coli sickened more than 200 people in 36 states. Public health officials have traced the strain of bacteria to a canal that carries water to vegetable growers in the country’s biggest lettuce growing region, near Yuma, Arizona. That canal that also runs by a massive cattle operation that can hold more than 100,000 cattle.
Although the bacteria’s resistance to antibiotics did not affect treatment — antibiotics would not have been used to treat the E. coli in question — it tied the outbreak to one of our most urgent public health threats: the spread of resistant bacteria, sometimes due to the reckless use of antibiotics on industrial farms.
You can do your part to protect our life-saving medicines by choosing meat raised without routine antibiotic use. Seek out labels like “No Antibiotics” or ”Raised without Antibiotics” and make sure that those labels are accompanied by a “USDA Process Verified” label, which confirms that the meat producers’ follow those claims. You can also buy organic meat, which is produced without antibiotics.
Take it from the antibiotic resistance expert at the Milken Institute of Public Health, Dr. Lance Price, who says that he will “always choose animals not raised with antibiotics.”
