Proposed New Antibiotic Limits for Livestock Are Easily Bypassed

When it comes to our country's relationship with food, California is a bellwether: What happens here spreads to the rest of the country. So, when the state decides to take on the problem of farmers pumping too many antibiotics into their animals -- inadvertently creating superbugs we have no defense against -- by introducing the first restrictive measures in the country, well, that's definitely a good thing. Right?

Not so fast.

Earlier this month, a trio of U.S. senators made news when they took a look at the FDA's plan to limit antibiotic usage in animals and found it lacking. Specifically, their complaints were with a giant loophole that would essentially allow farmers to bypass the stated rules.

See, the measures introduced by the FDA allow antibiotics only after farmers receive a veterinarian's prescription. (This is different from the current policy of allowing farmers to buy as many buckets of antibiotics as they want.) This new method is intended to keep farmers from using antibiotics to simply make their animals larger (the standard reason farmers use them in the first place) and instead only allowing their use to prevent or contain disease.

The problem is this definition is a bit too vague for environmental groups (along with the aforementioned senators) who feel this can be exploited. If one cow gets a disease, should all cows be placed on antibiotics as a preventative measure? How about neighboring farms since some of these diseases can spread? And how far of a distance does "neighboring" mean?

You can see how things start to get murky. And, unfortunately, that's the exact problem with a new California bill that just passed the Senate.

CA Senate Bill 835 -- currently just awaiting Jerry Brown's signature before it's made into law -- is essentially the exact same thing as the FDA's proposed rules, only allowing the use of antibiotics with a vet's prescription. But its passage may cause more harm than good. Says the California Director of Public Affairs at the Environmental Working Group nonprofit organization:

The worry is that those in leadership will look at the bill's passage as the end of long surgery, when really it's just a feebly-applied Band-Aid. Instead of actually introducing change and legitimate regulation, all that's being introduced is an easily bypassed step. The problem is, there may not be other realistic options.

Back in January, Assemblyman Kevin Mullin from San Francisco proposed a bill that introduced more stringent regulations for the use of antibiotics, including forcing the state's farms to post information about their slaughters on an Internet-accessible website. This is the bill a lot of environmentalists feel does the most to secure our safety. However, the bill didn't even make it out of assembly due to lack of support. Like it or not, this new bill is really the only one that's ever even been close to passing.

So, what's the best course of action? Passing this bill will definitely cut down on the use of antibiotics. (Having to obtain a veterinarian's signature is, at the very least, an extra step to getting the antibiotics.) But by how much? And could its passage allow legislators to rest on this issue, thinking they've already done enough.? After all, it would comprised more antibiotics regulations than the rest of the U.S. combined. But it's too easy to game this system.