Antibiotics have transformed the practice of medicine over the past century, allowing doctors to cure bacterial infections that once meant amputations, disabilities and often death. Now doctors are increasingly seeing patients with infections like MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) that are not responding to usually effective antibiotics. Widespread misuse of these curative medicines undermines their effectiveness. In recognition of this fact, healthcare providers are increasingly protecting antibiotics by moving away from prescribing them preventively.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for factory farm operators. According to the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), up to 80 percent of antibiotics sold in the United States are fed to animals raised for food. This is a misguided effort to control the diseases that spread in over-crowded and unsanitary factory farm environments.

Dr. Larry Moore

For decades, the medical community has been able to prescribe antibiotics with an extraordinarily high level of confidence that doing so would improve patients’ lives. Now, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) has declared that we are entering a post-antibiotic era. The CDC reported in 2013 that 2 million people in the United States contract an antibiotic-resistant infection each year, and of these, 23,000 die.

Antibiotics work to eradicate bacterial infections. They are not effective for treatment of viral infections such as head colds or influenza. Additionally, an antibiotic must be administered in appropriate doses and for long enough to kill the infecting bacteria, which is why it is important to follow the prescription directions completely.

Antibiotics are administered to factory farmed food animals in a way that creates the ideal conditions for bacterial antibiotic resistance to develop. Because these animals are fed low daily doses of antibiotics, bacteria that are present in the animals develop an immunity or resistance to these medicines.

These resistant bacteria, sometimes known as “superbugs,” persist in the environment and are much less susceptible to the antibiotics meant to kill them. Superbugs can infect anyone. They are in our waterways, our public places, and with increasing frequency, in our food supply. Excluding meat from our diet will not protect us from antibiotic-resistant infections.

Regulators continue to ignore the root causes of the rise of superbugs. The FDA reported in the 1970s that there was a clear necessity to decrease the use of antibiotics in food animal production. Large agricultural companies lobbied the FDA, but the government took no action. Continuing to improperly feed our life-saving antibiotics to farm animals that aren’t sick will only maintain the upward trend of illness and death for thousands of Americans and their families.

Congress has an opportunity to take action. The Preventing Antibiotic Resistance Act (PARA), now active in the Senate, would allow farmers to give antibiotics to farm animals for treatment of real infections, but prohibit preventive feeding of antibiotics in animals’ daily food and water. Decreasing the overuse of antibiotics on factory farms will help slow the development of antibiotic resistant infections. Passing PARA (and its counterpart in the House, PAMTA) is the necessary first step.

Senator Michael Bennet is aware that factory-farming practices compromise the effectiveness of antibiotics, but he has not yet sponsored PARA. Instead, Senator Bennet recently sponsored the PATH Act to speed up the approval of new antibiotics. But, as long as we continue this misuse of antibiotics, it is only a matter of time before any newly approved antibiotics will also be rendered ineffective.

As physicians we rely on the use of antibiotics to treat some of our most seriously ill and dying patients. We urge Senator Bennet to take the right action to protect the effectiveness of all antibiotics by ending their misuse on factory farms. By sponsoring PARA, Senator Bennet can play a direct role in saving lives in Colorado and across the United States.

— Dr. Kajsa Harris works at Rocky Mountain P.A.C.E. and as an associate medical director at Gentivia hospice in Colorado Springs. Dr. Larry Moore is Board Certified in Emergency Medicine, and practices Urgent Care Medicine in Woodland Park; he is a member of the El Paso County Medical Society, and the Colorado Medical Society.