LITTLE ROCK — The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this month said it will limit the extralabel use of cephalosporins on food-production animals such as cattle, swine, chickens and turkeys.
The antibiotic cephalosporin, labeled to treat pneumonia in a dairy cow, can also treat a cow’s uterine infection. Veterinarians call employing drugs approved and labeled to treat one type of ailment to deal with another an “extra-label” use.
Cephalosporins are a class of antibiotics used to treat food animals as well as humans. People are prescribed cephalosporin antibiotics to treat pneumonia and skinand soft-tissue infections, the FDA said.
The FDA contends that human consumption of food with traces of cephalosporins can transfer drug-resistant strains of food-borne bacterial pathogens. That transfer can decrease the effectiveness of a similar antibiotic used in a person who’s sick, the government wrote in its Federal Register submission on Jan. 6.
“If cephalosporins are not effective in treating these diseases, doctors may have to use drugs that are not as effective or that have greater side effects,” the FDA said in a news release.
Some food-animal production groups say the science isn’t there to support a human-animal connection regarding antibiotic resistance.
The rule takes effect in April and will prohibit the use of cephalosporin drugs at unapproved dose levels, frequencies or duration; in “unapproved” species; or for disease prevention. The FDA is taking public comment on the rule until March 6.
This is the FDA’s second attempt to prohibit extralabel use of cephalosporins, after industry criticism prompted the withdrawal of a similar measure in 2008. The prohibition reignited a decades-old debate over whether antibiotic use in animals builds resistance in humans when similar antibiotics are used.
The new prohibition will not hurt food animal production in Arkansas “as much as future antibiotics that could be taken off the list,” said George Pat Badley, the state veterinarian of Arkansas in a telephone interview. “There’s been a threat of this happening for quite awhile.”
Arkansas is home to an estimated 125 dairy farms and thousands of poultry farms, both of which use cephalosporins and other antibiotics to treat their animals.
Badley said it’s likely that the FDA will close off more antibiotics to prevent their “nontherapeutic” uses in food animals. A therapeutic use is when a drug is administered to a sick animal, unlike a prophylactic, or preventive, use.
Badley said he wasn’t convinced of the validity of claims that the use of antibiotics in food animals develops antibiotic resistance in humans.
Only licensed veterinarians can prescribe an extra-label use of a drug on food animals.
Cephalosporin antibiotics are currently approved for treatment of respiratory disease in cattle, sheep, goats and swine; foot rot and metritus — a uterine inflammation — in cattle; and mastitis in dairy cattle. It is also approved for the control of E. coli infections in day-old chicks and turkeys, according to the FDA.
Dairy cattle veterinarians prescribe cephalosporin drugs under brand names such as Naxcel, Excenel and Exceed, said Tim O’Neill, a veterinarian and the owner of Country Veterinary Service in Farmington. He includes two dairies in his practice.
For food animals, the antibiotics have recommended “withdrawal” periods, which is the amount of time it takes an animal to eliminate the drug from its system.
“I know a producer who sent his cow to the sale barn and waited for the recommended slaughter withdrawal time and his cow was still flagged,” but an animal’s physiology changes when it’s sick, he said, explaining why drug residue might be detected in dairy-cattle meat.
“Ninety-nine percent of producers are very conscientious [about withdrawal recommendations] and won’t let it [sending a drugged cow to a sale barn] happen,” O’Neill said.
“But there are some that would rather not lose whatever money they can get from the sale barn.”
Tim Crawley of Maysville culls his herd of 300 dairy cows on a regular basis, since milk production can drop off in some animals and others don’t always “breed back,” or become impregnated when inseminated.
On average, six cows from Crawley’s farm are sent to the sale barn every month, he said. From the sale barn, an animal likely enters the nation’s food system at a processing plant where it gets turned into hamburger meat.
Antibiotics are tested in the animal’s milk before further processing and consumption, he said.
Drug levels are randomly tested in meat from dairy cows — and all commercial cattle — according to the USDA’s Food Safety Information Service website. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service reported antibiotic residue in 113 dairy cows and 22 veal and beef cattle for a year’s time ending in June 2009.
Of the 32.77 million cattle slaughtered in the United States in 2009, about 2.82 million were dairy cattle, according to USDA data.
The poultry industry has also been targeted as contributing to antibiotic resistance. FDA surveys from 2001 show injection of antibiotics “in ovo,” or in the egg, were happening in hatcheries across the country — an extra-label use.
An antibiotic is sometimes included with the “in egg” vaccination that typically is administered a day before a chick hatches, said Tom Super, spokesman for the National Chicken Council.
The drug is needed because the vaccination needle leaves a hole where bacteria could enter and the antibiotic helps prevent any infection, he said.
Antibiotics “are not that widely used” in the poultry industry, said Super, adding that the price of chicken in the supermarket will not be affected by the FDA rule.
“When antibiotics are used in chicken production, strict withdrawal periods must be followed before the birds are processed for food,” Super wrote in a press release. “Chicken consistently has the best record of any product tested by the USDA.”
The American College of Poultry Veterinarians in its 2008 opposition letter said “no imminent danger has been demonstrated to human health based on extra-label use in poultry.”
The Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming in a Jan. 4 press release said multiple studies have linked extra-label usage in meat and poultry production to the emergence of cephalosporin-resistant bacteria that can infect people.
The Washington, D.C.-based group seeks to preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics in humans by phasing out their overuse in food-animal production.
In the same release, the campaign called the pending extra-label restriction a victory for human health, “as it will help ensure we can still rely on cephalosporins to treat life-threatening infections today and in the future.”
Business, Pages 67 on 01/15/2012