Bill to limit antibiotics in beef is introduced

There is a bill that is being proposed right now called the Preservation for Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. (You can follow and read more about the bill here .) But here's a summary:

Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act of 2007 - Amends the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to deny an application for a new animal drug that is a critical antimicrobial animal drug unless the applicant demonstrates that there is a reasonably certainty of no harm to human health due to the development of antimicrobial resistance attributable to the nontherapeutic use of the drug. Defines "critical antimicrobial animal drug" as a drug intended for use in food-producing animals that contains specified antibiotics or other drugs used in humans to treat or prevent disease or infection caused by microorganisms.
Requires the Secretary to withdraw approval of a nontherapeutic use of such drugs in food-producing animals two years after the date of enactment of this Act unless certain safety requirements are met.
Requires the manufacturer of such a drug or an animal feed for food-producing animals containing such a drug to report sales information to the Secretary.

Right now over 70% of all antibiotics in this country is given to farm animals (specifically mostly feed lot cattle to fight off the myriads of problems that comes from eating a corn based diet) and this bill is designed to limit the use of those antibiotics for a couple of reasons. 

1. Those drugs should be going to humans that need them and not to feed lot cattle.

2. They produce an environment where antibiotic resistant illnesses are being born and bred. 

There's a simple way to fix this issue ... and that is to change feed lot cattle to a wheat based diet instead of a corn based one. This issue has been debated before so I wont bore you with the details. There are two great sites with interesting articles about this. One is the Scientific American and the second is of course one of my daily reads ... Marion Nestle's Food Politics. 

There's a lot more to say about this and I'll be doing some blogging about this later and go into more depth with some more facts and figures.