The latest Chain Reaction Report from Consumer Reports and other advocacy groups finds the fast food industry has made little progress on getting antibiotics out of its beef supply chains. What you need to know about beef with raised with antibiotics and fast food chains.
www.consumerreports.org
In an ideal world, federal regulators would set targets for reducing the use of antibiotics in food production and implement robust tracking of both antibiotic use and bacterial resistance in farms. In the absence of such action on the part of regulators, however, the goal of the Chain Reaction report is to pressure chain restaurants, which purchase a huge portion of the beef produced in the U.S., to make changes.
“While the government actually should be taking action, we know that companies themselves can accelerate change by changing their policies on their own,” says Michael Hansen, Ph.D., CR’s senior scientist. He notes that restaurant companies know consumers are concerned about the use of antibiotics in food and want to be able to buy meat that was raised without antibiotics. “Fast food restaurants have tremendous market power and can help address our antibiotics crisis by requiring their beef suppliers to stop misusing these life-saving drugs,” he says.
sing antibiotics unnecessarily leads to the development of bacteria resistant to them, as microbes have more opportunities to evolve to better resist and defeat the drugs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
estimates that 2.8 million antibiotic-resistant infections occur every year in the U.S. About 660,000 of those are caused by resistant forms of salmonella and campylobacter, two bacteria commonly spread by food animals. The CDC says 35,000 people die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections.