FDA Finally Imposes Some Controls On Agricultural Antibiotics. Sort Of.

This morning, the US Food and Drug Administration dropped some long-awaited-but-still-big news regarding the use of antibiotics in meat production. Tl;dr: The FDA asked (but did not compel) the livestock industry to stop using the micro-dose “growth promoter” antibiotics that are widely believed to contribute to increase in antibiotic resistant bacteria in animals, food and humans.

With exquisite timing, they happen to have picked a day when I am traveling, in order to get to my end-of-semester evaluation tomorrow for my  MIT fellowship. So I’m going to do what curation I can on this, and point to some important reactions and analyses. I’ll come back for a deeper look, probably on the weekend.

So here are the basics.

What did the FDA do?

The action: The agency released two documents, the Final Guidance for Industry 213 and the Draft Veterinary Feed Directive.