Pork Magazine and Pigs on Drugs

Two things:

1) There is a magazine called Pork. Its website includes sections labeled Swine Practitioner and Pork Exec. This is what happens in the curly part of the Long Tail, and it is so beautiful it brings a tear to my eye.

2) Via CCF, via Pork, I am alerted to this letter to the editor in the Chicago Tribune from a swine veterinarian:

You imply that overuse of antibiotics in livestock is a primary cause of antibiotic resistance, which is sapping the effectiveness of these drugs in treating human disease. To support that argument, you state as fact an estimate from the Union of Concerned Scientists that 70 percent of all U.S. antibiotics are given to livestock for non-therapeutic purposes. This estimate is junk science at its worst, and eight years old too. Among other things, it includes products that were licensed but never sold in this country. Two examples are oleandomycin and efrotomycin, estimated to be used in pigs at a rate of 66,000 pounds per year. Neither drug was ever marketed.

One swine veterinarian does not a peer-reviewed study make, but I bet this guy has a point. The whole penicillin-pigs-and-cephalexin-cows-are-ruining-medicine thing is such powerful conventional wisdom that it's easy to accept ever-larger and more catastrophic-sounding estimates of the magnitude of the problem. (2/3 of Americans are overweight! 4/3 of American are obese!) I'm sure we could—and possibly should—trim our barnyard drugging a bit. But it would be better if editorial writers chose to cite something more reliable than an old study from an activist group?