WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 (UPI) -- A panel of pharmaceutical industry experts Friday dismissed concerns by public health officials and said using antibiotics in pigs, cows and other food animals does not significantly increase the health risk for people eating the meat.
The Food and Drug Administration has the much-debated issue of animal antibiotics up for discussion at a meeting scheduled for next week.
The Union of Concerned Scientists contends that residues of antibiotic drugs in food are a potential problem because they can cause allergic or toxic reactions and might contribute to the development of resistant organisms inside the human gut.
The organization's Web site says that "resistant bacteria arise on the farm when antibiotics are fed to animals in food and water. The bacteria, which usually reside within the guts of the pigs, chickens, or beef, may contaminate meat during slaughter and processing, be released into the environment, or be transmitted by workers."
At that point, the concern is antibiotics wouldn't work against the bacteria in humans and there would be little doctors could do to stop an infection.
The concern over the public health implications has spurred the FDA to move towards requiring animal drug manufacturers to put these antibiotics through an assessment to determine the risk they pose to humans.
The group of scientists, risk assessors and veterinarians convened by the Animal Health Institute, a trade group that represents animal drug manufacturers, reviewed the available data on the topic. They concluded Friday that although the use of antibiotics in animals undoubtedly leads to resistant organisms that reach humans via the food chain, this poses only a very small health concern to people.
Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, told United Press International: "We would disagree with that as a general statement."
Sundlof said the conclusions of the AHI panel are misleading because they imply that all antibiotics are safe. Each antibiotic has to be evaluated individually, he said.
"Certain antibiotics aren't very much of a risk at all and some of them are, and it's our job to figure out which ones present the greatest potential risk to the public," he said.
One class that the FDA is very concerned about is fluoroquinolones, Sundlof said. This class of antibiotics is used to treat salmonella and campylobacter -- two types of bacterial infections that find their way into humans via tainted meat. If use of these antibiotics leads to the development of resistant strains in animals and then infected humans, a key class of antibiotics may no longer be able to knock out the bugs.
Fluroquinolones are used in animals to promote growth. The AHI panel found that in Denmark, where growth-promoting antibiotics have been banned, pigs actually develop more diarrhea and other diseases that require greater use of therapeutic antibiotics.
Since 1999, when the growth-promoting antibiotics were banned there, antibiotic use has increased more than 90 percent, the panel found.
Since then, human cases of infection with salmonella and campylobacter have reached record levels in Denmark and the number of cases involving a strain of salmonella resistant to several antibiotics has doubled.
Sundlof disputed the finding, saying the FDA has "done risk assessments that link use of (fluoroquinolones) in chickens to the development of resistant campylobacter infections in humans."
The agency also has proposed a ban on use of fluoroquinolones in animals, but it is being challenged in court by an animal drug manufacturer.
Tony Cox, a risk assessment expert on the AHI panel and a professor of mathematics at the University of Colorado at Denver, told UPI the increase in infections in humans with resistant strains of bacteria held true across Europe in countries other than Denmark.
"Human health has been getting worse after the ban on growth-promoting antibiotics," he said. "Changing the use of antibiotics on the farm probably has minimal impact on human health and probably not much positive impact on animal health."
The panel suggested a combination of good hygienic practices on farms and proper cooking and handling of meat by consumers could lower the rate of resistant infections.
Sundlof agreed with those recommendations, but he also noted that "unfortunately people don't always do that" so controlling antibiotic use in animals helps ensure that if people become infected with bacteria they have access to drugs that can kill the bugs.
The FDA has issued draft guidelines that require manufacturers of animal drugs to assess the threat that their antibiotics pose to human health. The agency is to discuss the guidelines at a meeting scheduled for next Wednesday.
Sundlof noted existing animal antibiotics already on the market would also be required to undergo the risk assessment.
Cox said although he does not oppose the new guidelines, they ultimately would not protect human health because they leave out critical information essential for assessing infection risk. The requirements don't require manufacturers to quantify the level of bacterial contamination in meat, they only require determination of whether it is contaminated.
Previous research has shown that determining the level of contamination is essential for accurate risk assessment, he said.
