Preparing for a tsunami of resistant infections: What FDA data tell us about the importance of industrial meat production

New evidence is overturning the conventional wisdom that antibiotic resistance is necessarily a function of antibiotic use in humans. Contributing to that sea change are three things: Basic microbiological understanding that resistace is a systems or ecological phenomenon; new FDA data confirming that more than 70% of all U.S. antimicrobials are used not in clinical settings, but on farms; and the emergence of new, resistant pathogenic strains on food and in the farm environment of particular concern to public health. This presenttation discusses the first two topics, providing a brief overview of how to think ecologically or in systems about ecological resistance, and also looking in depth at the FDA data, publicly released in December 2010.