"Who’s hogging our antibiotics?" That’s the question a new advertising campaign is posing to folks in and around Washington, D.C.
The Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming posted the series of ads. Washington, D.C., Metro stations and trains last week , is part of the project’s national effort to end what they believe is the misuse of antibiotics in food-animal production. PEW claims that up to 70 percent of human antibiotics are being fed to animals on "factory farms," which promotes the development of "deadly" strains of drug-resistant bacteria that can spread to humans.
"Human antibiotics are routinely misused on industrial farms to compensate for crowded, stressful and unsanitary conditions," said Laura Rogers, a project director with the Pew Health Group. "The way we are raising our food animals is putting human health at risk."
The ads can be seen in the Capitol South and Union Station Metro stops this month, as well as in Metro cars on the red line and blue/orange line trains. A version of the ads will also appear online and in Washington, D.C., newspapers.
The new ads are timed to influence the debate on Capitol Hill on the Preservation of Antimicrobials for Medical Treatment Act (H.R. 1549), which the House of Representatives received this spring. The Senate has received a similar bill (S. 619).
For more information on the PEW committee’s efforts, and to see its new ad campaign, go to saveantibiotics.org.
Source: Pork, June 9, 2009