The meat industry is sabotaging one of modern medicine’s greatest miracles

Around a decade ago, the US implemented new rules to limit the widespread use of antibiotics in meat and dairy production, in an effort to combat the nation’s antibiotic resistance crisis. The regulations helped: Antibiotic sales for use on farms plunged by 43 percent from 2015 to 2017, and plateaued thereafter.

But now, that progress appears to be backsliding. According to recently published data from the Food and Drug Administration, sales of antibiotics for use in livestock surged by an alarming 15.8 percent in 2024 from the previous year.

The sudden increase worries the scientists I spoke with who track the issue.

“It’s disappointing to see such a substantial increase,” Meghan Davis, a veterinarian and associate professor of environmental health and engineering at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me over email. “Antimicrobial use in food-producing animals matters for human health.”

Antibiotics are a bedrock of modern medicine, used to treat common bacterial infections from strep throat to urinary tract infections to E.coli, and they’re a major reason why common infections are generally no longer extremely dangerous in the modern world. According to one estimate, antibiotics have increased average human life expectancy by over 20 years since the early 20th century.

But in the US and around the globe, most antibiotics aren’t used in human medicine, and instead are fed to farmed animals as a means to prevent and treat illness in unhygienic, overcrowded factory farms where disease is prevalent and spreads quickly.

The meat industry’s dependence on antibiotics has, in turn, contributed to the rise of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotic treatment. When someone becomes infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, also known as “superbugs,” certain antibiotics are less effective — or entirely ineffective — making common infections harder to treat.

The World Health Organization considers antimicrobial resistance to be “one of the top global public health and development threats.” In 2019, it was responsible for an estimated 1.27 million deaths globally, with 35,000 of them in the US — and 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the US each year.

For a time, the US demonstrated it could make progress on the antibiotic resistance problem. Ten years ago, the livestock industry was even voluntarily pledging to reduce antibiotic use. But now that all appears to have been lip service — and regulators are doing little to rein in the industry’s overuse.

Why did meat producers buy so many more antibiotics in 2024?

There are only two legitimate reasons why livestock producers might have ramped up their antibiotic purchases in 2024: either they raised a lot more animals or they had to fight off a lot more diseases than usual.

But neither explanation makes sense for 2024. Meat production grew by just 0.65 percent last year, and according to several experts I spoke with, there weren’t especially notable disease outbreaks that would explain the sharp increase.

A spokesperson for the US Department of Health and Human Services told me that “animal sectors experienced several health challenges in 2024,” pointing to the spread of the avian metapneumovirus in poultry birds and avian influenza, or bird flu, in poultry birds and dairy cattle. But Gail Hansen, an antimicrobial expert and former state public health veterinarian in Kansas, told me that these are viral infections, not bacterial, so using antibiotics to treat them does not make sense.

A spokesperson for the National Chicken Council said over email that the increase in antibiotic use on chicken farms is likely due to treating secondary infections from avian metapneumovirus, though that doesn’t explain the overall increase of antibiotic sales in the meat industry, because the chicken sector uses a small share.

Hansen’s guess as to what’s going on: Meat producers are “not being good stewards of antibiotics,” she said, and are likely using them to prevent, rather than treat, disease. It’s a “crazy concept,” she said, but it’s common practice in the meat industry.

Hansen’s not alone in her frustration; public health experts have long argued that feeding antibiotics to healthy animals as a way to prevent disease — as opposed to treating animals when they’re actually sick — is a dangerous misuse of the drugs because it increases the chance that bacteria on farms develop resistance, which then makes them less effective when treating humans.

Over email, the chief science officer of the National Milk Producers Federation, Jamie Jonker, said he can’t comment on the increase in antibiotics in cattle production because the FDA does not separate antibiotic sales for beef vs. dairy cattle, and that “the majority of antibiotic use in dairy is for intramammary infections, i.e. mastitis, and the use of antibiotics that treat those conditions declined 11.5% from 2023 to 2024.”

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, meanwhile, said in a statement that decisions about antibiotic use “are made by individual farmers and ranchers in consultation with their veterinarians. Because of those unique factors, we can’t generalize across the entire industry.”

The National Pork Producers Council did not respond to a request for comment.

The livestock industry can scale back on antibiotics — if it has the will

US meat and dairy producers don’t actually need to use tons of antibiotics to manage disease spread. Europe is proof: As of a few years ago, antibiotic use per animal there was about half that of the US. European producers have managed to slash their reliance on antibiotics by using other, more responsible means to prevent disease, including more frequently and thoroughly cleaning barns, increasing ventilation, giving animals more space, and using more vaccines.

In the US, antibiotics are heavily used as a shortcut to avoid these costs and additional labor. “It is cheaper to compensate for unhealthy conditions with antibiotics than to raise animals under healthy conditions,” Steven Roach of the nonprofit Food Animal Concerns Trust told me over email.

Over the last 15 years, as public attention to the harms of antibiotic resistance grew, dozens of large US livestock companies, fast food chains, and supermarkets pledged to cut back on antibiotic use in farmed animals. But that attention has since faded, and the food industry has failed to decrease antibiotic use since 2017. There’s even evidence that they may be deceiving the public on the issue.

Last year, the US Department of Agriculture sent letters to dozens of beef producers — including some of the world’s largest, like JBS, Tyson, and Cargill — warning that the beef they were marketing as “antiobiotic-free,” “raised without antibiotics,” or bearing similar claims, contained traces of antibiotics. Twenty percent of beef samples tested by the agency were positive for antibiotic residues.

“This strongly suggests that the US antibiotic-free beef supply is deeply contaminated and deeply deceptive to American consumers,” Andrew deCoriolis, the executive director of the nonprofit Farm Forward, told Sentient earlier this year.

Hansen and other experts I spoke with want to see the FDA take more action to restrict unnecessary use, including setting concrete goals for national reductions in antibiotic use on farms, barring meat producers from using antibiotics preventively (something Europe did in 2022), and set more limits on the maximum duration of antibiotic use.

Without these basic steps, the FDA is essentially gambling the future effectiveness of these miracle drugs to let the meat and dairy industries marginally increase their profits.