Prescription for trouble

ALMOST AS SOON as antibiotics came into widespread use during World War II -- allowing battlefield doctors to cure once-fatal infections -- bacteria started evolving to resist the miracle drugs. The medical profession further eroded antibiotics’ effectiveness by prescribing them too blithely, sometimes for the wrong illnesses; patients chipped in by stopping their medications too soon.

Now a drug company wants to use an important human antibiotic on beef cattle, another major way in which antibiotic resistance is bred. The Food and Drug Administration should deny the request.

The drug, cefquinome, belongs to a class of antibiotics used as a last line of defense for patients with weakened immune systems, such as the elderly or children with cancer. The veterinary drug company Intervet wants to use cefquinome as a treatment mostly for bovine respiratory disease, a common illness in cattle that are shipped and corralled in feedlots. Crowded and stressed, these cattle are more susceptible to the disease.

Unlike other antibiotics that are routinely added to livestock feed to prevent disease and promote growth, cefquinome must be injected and could be used only with a prescription. But so-called shipping fever is common and costly enough in cattle that medical groups are rightly alarmed that the use of cefquinome would become routine or even preventive. The American Medical Assn. and American Public Health Assn. are among several health organizations opposing cefquinome as a treatment for cattle.

Changing farming practices would go a long way toward reducing the spread of the disease, but that’s not on the livestock industry’s agenda. Meanwhile, the industry already has a dozen other medications for bovine respiratory disease. The FDA’s veterinary committee recommended against Intervet’s application, but the agency’s recently adopted guidelines make it difficult to block antibiotic use except in extreme cases. As a result, it’s uncertain how the FDA will rule.

But the decision should be clear. On a scale that measures a steer’s health against human safety, the ability to fight infection in frail people must win.