I’m old enough to remember that penicillin cured almost everything. You started a 10-day course, and felt better in a day and a half.
The problem was that many folks stopped taking it, when they felt better.
These days, American meat is absolutely overflowing with antibiotics. I don’t know if there’s any kind of serious effort to address that.
This really wasn't the problem. There was never any strong science behind it, other than just an abundance of caution. But you can also argue that taking antibiotics for an extra week is bad because it prolongs the evolutionary pressure on microbes to develop resistance.
Either way, stuff like that is inconsequential. Most drug-resistant strains crop up in hospice and hospital settings where immunocompromised or gravely ill patients are kept on a cocktail of antibiotics for months or years, and resistant bacteria have a significant advantage and can spread easily.
And it's not like we have a good alternative to that - "let more people die earlier" is not an easy sell.
This is possibly followed by overuse of antibiotics in animal husbandry, although that part is more complicated than usually implied.
stopping when you feel better might actually just be better, though I'd have to go find that reference again.
Factory Farms do feed animals low doses of antibiotics constantly because doing so makes farm animals more efficient at converting animal feed into tasty, tasty meat.
We aren't talking about giving injured or sick animals or people antibiotics until they are well, we are talking about creating conditions on huge factory farms where bacteria can only survive and thrive if they evolve the ability to shrug off the constant presence of antibiotics.
Unfortunately, bacteria also are able to trade those antibiotic resistance genes from one strain to another, so new antibiotic resistance genes can get transferred to bacteria like tuberculosis that are already a problem without learning new genetic tricks.
Look up the percentage of antibiotics by weight that are used on farms vs. those given to people.
> Of all antibiotics sold in the United States, approximately 80% are sold for use in animal agriculture; about 70% of these are “medically important” (i.e., from classes important to human medicine). Antibiotics are administered to animals in feed to marginally improve growth rates
I expected more, since biomass distribution is 62:34 for livestock to humans, the remaining 4% are wild animals[1]. So rather a 2:1 ratio.
The antibiotics are 4:1.
Livestock is fed a constant stream of antibiotics, but apparently Americans are fed a half as constant stream of antibiotics as well?
Last time I took antibiotics was decades ago. What are you all doing?
Decreasing big pharma's quarterly profits is not an easy sell, you mean?
Or are we supposed to pretend any of this has to do with concern over people's well being?
Second, try to convince a random family that they should withhold antibiotics and let grandma die of pneumonia and report how that conversation went.
Part of keeping old sick people alive is generic antibiotics.
Therefore, we will continue to have them.
It has nothing to do with what people who have no power think, feel or do.
There’s several clearly wrong claims in that paragraph alone.
Here’s one counter claim with sources:
https://www.health.state.mn.us/diseases/antibioticresistance...
“Less than 0.5% of all meat samples tested in 2018 contained detectable antibiotics (U.S. Residue Program). Farmers, processors, and regulatory agencies work together to get this number to zero.”
Please challenge the thoughts you carry around. Sometimes it’s isn’t so.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard plenty of concern (from the public) that the latter could breed resistant bacteria, but never even heard of your interpretation as a concern.
My understanding, is that antibiotics are used in the living animals. I’m sure that they do show up in butchered meats, but I don’t think that they would stay valid through cooking.
> Did you know? As of January 1, 2017, Federal guidelines require a veterinarian to write the prescription or order when antibiotics important to human health will be used in feed or water of livestock and poultry. Why is this important? As in health care, professionals in veterinary medicine must identify where antibiotic use practices can be improved. Eliminating unnecessary antibiotic use is an important part of antibiotic stewardship.
Anyway, I took GP's comment to refer to the overuse of antibiotics in animals we slaughter and not the amount of antibiotics still detectable in the meat. As of 2015 at least that was still a problem and had an impact on resistant bacteria.
> Of all antibiotics sold in the United States, approximately 80% are sold for use in animal agriculture; about 70% of these are “medically important” (i.e., from classes important to human medicine).2 Antibiotics are administered to animals in feed to marginally improve growth rates and to prevent infections, a practice projected to increase dramatically worldwide over the next 15 years.3 There is growing evidence that antibiotic resistance in humans is promoted by the widespread use of nontherapeutic antibiotics in animals. Resistant bacteria are transmitted to humans through direct contact with animals, by exposure to animal manure, through consumption of undercooked meat, and through contact with uncooked meat or surfaces meat has touched.
On one side, bacteria have short lifecycles and huge populations, letting them mutate quickly to evade antibiotics, vaccines, or immune defenses.
On the other, humans don’t rely on slow genetic evolution - we adapt with medicine, vaccines, hygiene, and now faster tools like mRNA platforms.
The danger isn’t that we'll be "out-evolved" forever, but that we have to keep innovating or fall behind.
Right now there's not much of an incentive to create new antibiotics. It's quite rare that something can't be taken out with the antibiotics we have, and while that's slowly getting worse it means that drug companies probably can't make back their investment by the time the drug goes generic.
So, up it to 25 years or something like that. It's better we have some expensive drugs that work than none at all.
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https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/06/14/nx...