On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration released a vital set of numbers about the routine use of antibiotics in meat animals. The good news: The data is more granular than it has ever been before. The bad news: That granular data shows that most of the trends in ag antibiotic use are headed in the wrong direction.

If you’re a reader who came over from my old blog at Wired, where I talked about this topic a lot, skip down four paragraphs. If you’re new to reading me since I arrived here at Phenomena, stick around for a minute while I give you a short course. Here we go:

In human medicine, we place restrictions on how we use antibiotics. We give them