This morning, the US Food and Drug Administration dropped some long-awaited-but-still-big news regarding the use of antibiotics in meat production. Tl;dr: The FDA asked (but did not compel) the livestock industry to stop using the micro-dose “growth promoter” antibiotics that are widely believed to contribute to increase in antibiotic resistant bacteria in animals, food and humans.
With exquisite timing, they happen to have picked a day when I am traveling, in order to get to my end-of-semester evaluation tomorrow for my MIT fellowship. So I’m going to do what curation I can on this, and point to some important reactions and analyses. I’ll come back for a deeper look, probably on the weekend.
So here are the basics.