- The Plate
As Appetite for Meat Grows, Farm Antibiotics Use Will Soar
Recently, it looked like antibiotic use in agriculture in the United States was trending down–the result of decades of pressure by consumers on companies such as McDonald’s and Perdue Farms. But a new analysis by academics who study antibiotic use predicts that the drugs may not actually be going away. They might just be relocating.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Ramanan Laxminarayan of the Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics and Policy (CDDEP) in Washington, D.C. and colleagues predict that global use of agricultural antibiotics will rise by two-thirds by the year 2030—and that use in emerging economies such as China and India will double.
The authors, who hail from eight different institutions, say the increases will be driven by rising
