Ask your governor: Save antibiotics, stop their overuse on factory farms

Antibiotic overuse breeds superbugs that already kill tens of thousands of Americans every year. What's behind this overuse? Two-thirds of all the medically important antibiotics that are sold in the U.S. each year go to meat production, and producers routinely dose their livestock even when they aren't sick.

States can help put a stop to this. Tell your governor to support a law that allows the use of medically important antibiotics on livestock only to treat a sick animal or to control a verified disease outbreak.

Subject: Save our medicines: Stop the overuse of antibiotics on industrial farms

Your Letter:

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria pose an incredibly serious threat to public health. We're using too many of these wonder drugs and inadvertently breeding "superbugs" resistant to the strongest tools we have to combat bacterial infections. The CDC estimates that at least 35,000 Americans already die each year from drug-resistant infections.

Each year, two-thirds of all medically important antibiotics in the U.S. are sold for use in industrial farms, where meat producers routinely dose their animals with the drugs to compensate for cramped, unsanitary, and stressful conditions.

After years of warnings, we're finally moving in the right direction -- Antibiotic use on farms peaked in 2015 before regulations and market pressure spurred a promising decline. But new data shows that sales of medically important antibiotics to meat production actually ticked back up in 2018, and the increase is concentrated in beef and pork production.

We can't leave our children a world in which antibiotics don't work, in which surgeries and small injuries can often result in fatal infections. Please follow the lead of Maryland and California and support strong restrictions on routine antibiotic use on farms.

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