New for Consumers! RePurpose It!

FDA needs to be scrapped, and rebuilt from the ground up as an impartial entity with no outside influence. . Not only are they failing when it comes to pet food, but human food is no safer.

Here’s part of an email I got this morning from Mercola
The 50 Year Cover Up

In the U.S., use of antibiotics in food animals rose six-fold between 1960 and 1970. It didn’t take long before scientists started warning that this practice had the potential to create a public health crisis.

By the end of the 1960s, British scientists found that feeding antibiotics to animals produced resistant bacteria that could be transmitted to humans. A U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) task force came to a similar conclusion in 1972.

At that time, the FDA stipulated that drug manufacturers had to prove their products did not contribute to resistance or risk losing their drug approval. So, the drug industry set out to prove antibiotics in animal feed would not pose such problems.

As reported by Mother Jones, rather than settle the question, their efforts resulted in a 50-year long cover-up of the facts:

“[T]he Animal Health Institute, a trade group of animal-pharmaceutical manufacturers, contacted Dr. Stuart Levy, a young Tufts University researcher who specialized in antibiotic resistance.

The group wanted Levy to feed tiny, daily doses of antibiotics to chickens and see if the bacteria in their guts developed resistance … Levy found a family farm near Boston and experimented on two flocks of chickens.

One got feed with small amounts of tetracycline. The other went drug-free. Within 48 hours, strains of E. coli that were resistant to tetracycline started to show up in the manure of the birds fed drugs.

Within a week, nearly all the E. coli in those birds’ manure could resist tetracycline. Within three months, the E. coli showed resistance to four additional anti­biotics the birds had never been exposed to: sulfonamides, ampicillin, streptomycin, and carbenicillin.

Most striking of all, researchers found that E. coli resistant to multiple antibiotics was appearing in the feces of the farmers’ family members — yet not in a control group of neighbors.

The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, were so stunningly clear that Levy thought they would prompt the industry to rethink its profligate antibiotic use, or at least inspire the FDA to rein it in. But the industry rebuffed the study it had bankrolled, questioning the validity of the data …

In 1977, the FDA proposed new rules that would have effectively banned tetracycline and penicillin from animal feed, but the House agriculture appropriations subcommittee, led by agribusiness champion Rep. Jamie Whitten (D-Miss.), ordered the FDA to wait, ‘pending the outcome of further research.'”

FDA Complicit in the Antibiotic Cover-Up

An internal FDA review on the safety of feed additives belonging to penicillin and tetracycline classes of antibiotics, which began in 2001 and ended in 2010, revealed that 26 of the 30 drugs under review did not meet the safety guidelines set in 1973, and none of them met current safety guidelines.

However, this information only came to light after the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the FDA to obtain the documentation. The FDA is supposed to look at three factors when determining the safety of an antibiotic-based feed additive:

Are antibiotic-resistant bacteria being introduced into the food supply?
Are people likely to be exposed to those bacteria?
The consequences of what happens when people are exposed to those bacteria — would they still be able to get treated with human antibiotics?
Based on these three factors, the NRDC’s report9 concluded that virtually ALL feed additives containing penicillin and tetracycline antibiotics pose a “high risk” to human health and should not be permitted in animal feed, yet about half of the total sales for these two antibiotics are used for that purpose.

The FDA knew this for well over a dozen years, yet did nothing to curtail the unsafe use of these drugs. The NRDC report also found that as far back as the 1970s, when many of the antibiotics now used in feed were being reviewed for FDA approval, 18 of the 30 antibiotics were already considered “high risk” for human health, but were approved for use in animal feed anyway.

Over the years, as warnings about dire human health effects mounted, farmers started using more antibiotics, not less. Between 2009 and 2014, agricultural antibiotic use in the U.S. increased by 23 percent.

Finally, in December 2013, the FDA issued its long overdue guidance on agricultural antibiotics. Alas, it only went so far as to ask drug companies to voluntarily restrict the use of antibiotics that are important in human medicine by excluding growth promotion in animals as a listed use on the drug label.10

The rule goes into effect in January 2017. However, farmers can still use antibiotics for therapeutic purposes, and this loophole allows them to continue feeding their animals antibiotics for growth promotion without actually admitting it, since enforcement is lax at best.

Isn’t this practice the way we got MAD COW DISEASE???

OMG. Thank you, Susan!

This Bull Shit is really pushing me to my limit! The FDA, AAFCO they don’t give a rats ass about our poor pets and I’m really had enough. What is wrong with these people and hell the FDA doesn’t even care about human beings since they allow BigPharma Mafia Industry to make all these damn drugs that are killing us and our pets so why do we even need them? We DON”T!!! I wish more people would stand behind people Like Susan and I’m here if you need help. I actually wish I had the Billions that are spent on TV ads, magazine, newpaper ads for the Pet Food Industry because they would already be closed down. I’ve wanted to try to get onto National TV stations, news, some kind of show that tells/shows the TRUTH about the GARBAGE made in the form of ALL Dry Kibble & most canned foods in the entire world, not just the USA and get people to use their Gosh Darn brains, wake up out of the coma of bran washing, and start feeding their pets, their domestic carnivores, on how their bodies are designed! To eat a complete raw diet like they use to eat for 30,000+yrs for domestic dogs; 14,000+yrs for domestic cats! Before the damn PFI became the PFI!