Josh Wenderoff
Senior Officer, Communications
Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming
Tel: (202) 540-6548 jwenderoff@saveantibiotics.org
Protect Your Family
The goal of Moms for Antibiotic Awareness is to raise awareness across the country on the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in food animal production and to engage moms and those concerned about their family's health to take action for more judicious use of these drugs.
Call your principal, your representatives on the school board, and your school superintendent. Tell them that you want what Chicago's students have: meat raised without the routine use of antibiotics. Click here to download a letter that you can send telling them what steps they can take to protect our children's health.
Tell us your story: Why are you concerned about the misuse of antibiotics in food animal production? Why are antibiotics important to you and your family? Tell us through email or send a short video.
Eighty percent of antibiotics sold in the U.S. are given to food animals, often non-therapeutically to promote growth and to compensate for the effects of unsanitary and overcrowded conditions.
Many of the antibiotics used in food animal production - for example, penicillins, tetracyclines, macrolides and sulfonamides - are identical to, or from the same family as, drugs used in human medicine to cure serious diseases. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, because these classes of antibiotics are similar, bacteria resistant to antibiotics used in animals also will be resistant to antibiotics used in humans.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention testified before Congress last year that there was a definitive link between the routine, non-therapeutic uses of antibiotics on industrial farms and the crisis of antibiotic resistance in humans.
