Widespread Use of Antibiotics on Factory Farms Linked to Millions of Deaths Every Year — Will HHS, FDA Take Action?

By Natasha Gilbert

Efforts to curb the use of antimicrobials in farm animals and stem resistance to crucial antimicrobial medicines are at risk after layoffs at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Center for Veterinary Medicine earlier this month, warn legal experts and public health interest groups.

Excessive use of antimicrobials in farm animals contributes to the development of antimicrobial resistance, or AMR, a problem that killed 1.14 million people globally in a single year. Antimicrobials are a group of drugs that kill microorganisms, including bacteria, viruses and fungi.

On April 1, the Trump administration began laying off some 10,000 staff in a planned restructuring of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Those let go include more than 140 leaders and staff, including several veterinarians at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM), including Tristan Colonius, the Center’s chief veterinary officer, according to news reports.

The layoffs affect personnel working on antimicrobial resistance, the American Veterinary Medical Association (AVMA) confirmed to U.S. Right to Know.

The layoffs have dampened hopes that the new secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the FDA commissioner, Martin A. Makary, might prioritize tackling antimicrobial resistance and antimicrobial use on farms, say researchers and public interest groups.

Kennedy has spoken publicly of his concerns regarding industrial farming and Makary has called for cutting antimicrobial use in farm animals to help preserve drugs’ effectiveness for human health.

Delcianna Winders, director of the Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School, says she is concerned that the job losses will worsen the already declining effectiveness of lifesaving antimicrobial drugs.

“It seems less likely than ever that progress on this ticking time bomb will be made under the current administration,” she says.

The AVMA said in a statement that it is unclear how many veterinarians have lost their jobs but that it is working with Congress and the administration to restore key personnel and critical functions including responding to the bird flu crisis that has infected over 168 million birds across the country and has spread to dairy cows and poultry, as well as 67  human cases since 2022 including one death.

A news report by STAT also says that the FDA has appointed Timothy Schell as the new acting director of the CVM. Schell first joined the CVM in 2000 before jumping to the animal drug company Elanco Animal Health in 2014 for five years.

He then moved back to the CVM to lead its office of surveillance and compliance. He replaces Tracey Forfa, who has led the center since 2023. It is unclear what has happened to Forfa. The FDA did not respond to requests to confirm Schell’s appointment.

Andrew deCoriolis, executive director of Farm Forward, a group advocating for the end of factory farming, is concerned that Schell’s links to industry will not help efforts to reduce the use of antimicrobial drugs in food animals.

“It’s pretty hard to take seriously the idea that FDA is going to curb antibiotic use on farms when they appoint a former … drug company lobbyist as the chief regulator,” he says.

Promises to cut antimicrobials in animal agriculture

The cuts to the CVM staff who worked on antimicrobial resistance come at a time when nations around the world including the U.S. promised to tackle the crisis which is regarded by the World Health Organization as one of the most urgent threats to global public health.

In September 2024, at a meeting of the United Nations in New York, countries including the U.S. committed to “striving to meaningfully reduce” antimicrobials used in animal agriculture by 2030 to help curb AMR.

However, nations failed to agree on specific targets to reduce use following pushback from the U.S. and other meat-producing nations.

More antimicrobials are sold in the U.S. for use in farm animals than for humans each year, research suggests. They are used to treat sick animals and to prevent disease, and are sometimes given routinely to avoid the risk of infection.

Diseases can spread more quickly between animals on intensive farming systems, where large numbers of individuals are kept in close quarters, and hygiene and welfare can be poor.

The FDA and CVM have several initiatives underway to better manage and track the use of antimicrobials in farm animals.

These include draft guidance to encourage animal drug makers to voluntarily stop the continuous use of medically important antibiotics in food animals.

At the time of the layoffs, the FDA was considering comments from public interest groups, industry and others. It then planned to finalize the guidance at a later, unspecified date.

The FDA was also close to publishing revisions of another set of voluntary guidance, which tells drug makers how to assess the risk to human health from AMR when assessing the safety of new antimicrobial drugs for animals.

Advocates for cutting antimicrobials in farm animals have criticized aspects of both guidance documents, but generally, they were regarded as a step in the right direction.

For example, the guidance on setting limits on use didn’t go far enough to curb long-term use but it could still be an improvement on the current situation where some drugs can be used indefinitely, says Steven Roach, who works on safe and healthy food at the Food Animal Concerns Trust, or FACT, a campaign group in Chicago, Illinois.

Collecting data on antimicrobial use

In 2023, the Reagan-Udall Foundation published plans for a public-private partnership with industry to voluntarily collect data on the use of antimicrobials in farm animals. The project was funded by the FDA.

Currently, the FDA collects annual data on the volume of antimicrobials sold for farm animals. But this is only a crude measure of antimicrobial drugs used. Accurate use of data is crucial to be able to assess how and why drugs are administered, say campaign groups.

Public interest groups have long urged the FDA to collect data on antimicrobial use, but they objected to the FDA’s proposals for a voluntary system, which they say may not provide a representative picture of the industry.

Large industrial farms that may overuse antimicrobials would have little incentive to participate in a voluntary system because it would make them look bad, writes Madeleine Kleven, an analyst for FACT.

It is unclear how far the FDA has gotten in building the data collection partnership. But last year, in a letter to U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), the FDA highlighted that it had awarded grants to Cornell University and Kansas State University, and to a consulting firm to start collecting data.

Roach is concerned that the job cuts will hamper progress on data collection.

The cuts will impact the FDA’s “ability to get stuff done,” he says.

But deCoriolis is skeptical that the voluntary data collection efforts will produce any useful information or results, even without layoffs.

“Keeping track of some anonymized, voluntary data may be useful in some limited respects. But until we are mandating reductions on farms and regulating the types of drugs that can be used to get the most important drugs out of animal farming, everything else we’re doing is meaningless,” he says.

Despite the uncertain outlook, advocates are still pushing for change. A letter to Kennedy on April 24, organized by Keep Antibiotics Working, a coalition of public interest groups, calls on him to stop the routine use of antibiotics on industrial farms. It also requests that he set national targets to curtail use and track use in animal agriculture.

In a statement accompanying the letter, Sameer Patel, the director of the Antibiotic Stewardship program at the Ann and Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago said, “Common sense measures to track and reduce antibiotic overuse in food production are vital to ensure the safety of our food supply and environment and protect human health.”

Originally published by U.S. Right to Know

Natasha Gilbert is an investigative journalist covering industrial animal agriculture.