The Attack of the Superbugs

Food and Drug Administration officials met in Maryland last week to discuss ways of swatting increasingly dangerous “superbugs,” microbes that are warding off the most powerful antibiotics that medicine can muster. For example, the Centers for Disease Control recently reported new strains of drug-resistant salmonella bacteria in children; in addition, scientists have found that more than 20% of intestinal streptococcus infections acquired in hospitals have grown resistant to vancomycin. These hospital-acquired infections are a leading cause of death in the United States, so doctors and nurses are alarmed at the growth of bugs resistant to vancomycin, which they have long regarded as the big gun that eliminates infections other medications can’t touch. The CDC, meanwhile, reports that 600 people die from salmonella each year, many of them from the drug-resistant strains. Children are especially vulnerable.

Just before leaving office, the Clinton administration issued an “84-point action plan” for fighting the new superbugs. Some points are well taken, like the call for a national public education campaign to reduce the overuse of antibiotics. Consumers would be counseled not to buy hand creams and household cleaners containing antibiotics, while doctors would be advised against prescribing antibiotics for ear and sinus infections caused not by bacteria but fungi, which are unaffected by the antibiotics.

On the whole, however, the Clinton plan is pretty tame, leaving FDA officials on their own to press for more controversial--and effective--reforms. Two ideas proposed at the agency’s meeting last week deserve the Bush administration’s full and prompt support.

The first reform would halt the poultry industry’s use of an important class of antibiotics called fluoroquinolones, which has fostered the development of superbugs in chicken that have been passed on to humans. This troubles public health officials because these antibiotics have been a key tool for treating a variety of human illnesses, including sexually transmitted diseases.

FDA scientists also propose monitoring how and in what quantities antibiotics are being administered on farms. Antibiotics are increasingly given to cows, pigs and especially poultry, not to cure disease but to promote more growth on less feed and prevent the infections common in confined, crowded feedlots. Effective monitoring is particularly urgent in light of a study released earlier this month by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which concluded that the federal government’s system for gathering “basic information on antimicrobial usage” is shockingly deficient.

The FDA’s effort to ban quinolones has ruffled feathers throughout the poultry industry, and the farmer-friendly Bush administration may not readily support it. But Bush officials would be wise to implement the second reform promptly, for without basic data on antibiotic use the administration will be hard pressed to develop any strategy to knock down superbugs.

In her confirmation hearing, Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman said she will set farm policy “based on sound scientific principles.” That’s a sensible objective, but with superbugs, sound science will be possible only when there are sound data.