Support a bill that requires responsible use of antibiotics by food producers; buy meat and dairy from local farmers who don’t overuse antimicrobial meds.

If we overuse antibiotics to produce food, they may not help us when we're sick.

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—About a year after the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production released its findings and recommendations on the state of large-scale agriculture and its impact on environmental and human health, the Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming Campaign is taking the matter to the streets. Or rather, the subway. By peppering the D.C. Metro with ad posters featuring the faces of farm animals and factoids of the consequences of overusing antibiotics, the group hopes to open lawmakers’ eyes to a potential nightmare in the making: that antibiotics will stop working when we need them. Which, by the way, is already happening, says Pew and other organizations that include the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations. The campaign urges passage of the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), which would phase out the routine use of human medicines in livestock, reserving their use for when an animal is sick and actually needs treatment.

THE DETAILS: Most antibiotics used in this country don’t go to sick people, but are given to livestock that are crowded together and living in unsanitary conditions. By some accounts, 70 percent of the antibiotics used in this country are used in the livestock sector, with many used in concentrated animal-feeding operations, or CAFOs. The meds are given in low doses over the course of the animal’s life to spur growth, and to protect them from diseases which likely wouldn’t be such a problem if thousands of animals weren’t crammed together and/or living above or in their own feces. According to the campaign, the combination of using so many antibiotics in one place, in an area with unsanitary conditions and animal crowding, is a perfect storm for the production of superbugs, bacteria strains that are resistant to our medicines.

WHAT IT MEANS: We may already be feeling the effects of antibiotic overuse. Foodborne illnesses, says Pew, are becoming more difficult to treat due to the decreased effectiveness of antibiotics. And some scientists voiced concern when the H1N1 virus, a.k.a. the swine flu, broke out in Mexico near a factory farm partially owned by Smithfield Meats. They said conditions there were a perfect breeding ground for drug-resistant pathogens to mutate into more dangerous forms. The good news is that it’s not too late to break the antibiotic habit.