Philpott Meat Industry

In the article “The Meat Industry Now Consumes Four-Fifths of All Antibiotics”, written by Tom Philpott, the facts of antibiotics consumption are brought up. Philpott seems to be showing the drastic side of the defensive measure by showing the cost of the products to our economy. He also shows the rise of resistant bacteria in meat products because of the overuse of antibiotics. Philpott brings up some decent points like the rise of salmonella in turkey and the use of antibiotics in the meat industry being drastically higher than the use of antibiotics in humans. However Philpott also leaves out some key info that makes his prior points not match up. His argument seems partly ignorable with these incoherent facts. This leads the reader to feel …show more content…
He starts out the article by stating, “Last year, the Food and Drug Administration proposed a set of voluntary "guidelines" designed to nudge the meat industry to curb its antibiotics habit” (Philpott, The Meat Industry Now Consumes Four-Fifths of All Antibiotics). He goes on to state how the FDA is struggling to implement the new rules. This would not be a problem for the FDA if the meat industry was not expanding at a rapid rate and using more and more antibiotics each day. This constant use, as Philpott shows, is creating antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Philpott shows this growth of antibiotic use for both the meat and poultry industry on a graph. The graph show the millions of pounds of antibiotics sold for both the industries and sick human beings. The use of antibiotics by humans had leveled off at around 7.7 million in 2011. The use of antibiotics in industry however was growing to 29.9 million pounds of antibiotics sold. A harsh difference for sure, but Philpott had a typo when describing the graph.Philpott stated, “...livestock farms have been sucking in more and more of the drugs each year—and consumption reached a record nearly 29.9 billion pounds in 2011” (Philpott). This slipup of stating that the use of antibiotics in the meat industry was 29.9 billion pounds instead of the actual 29.9 million can mislead readers into thinking the use of antibiotics is way greater than it actually …show more content…
NARMS buys meat products and then tests them for bacterial pathogens. The facts Philpott highlights are that, “Of the Salmonella on ground turkey, about 78% were resistant to at least one antibiotic and half of the bacteria were resistant to three or more…, Nearly three-quarters of the Salmonella found on retail chicken breast were resistant to at least one antibiotic. About 12% of retail chicken breast and ground turkey samples were contaminated with Salmonella,” and “Resistance to tetracycline [an antibiotic] is up among Campylobacter on retail chicken. About 95% of chicken products were contaminated with Campylobacter, and nearly half of those bacteria were resistant to tetracyclines” (Philpott). These facts are pretty daunting. They really show the problem with the overuse of antibiotics. However, these points only highlight instances of antibiotic pathogens in the poultry industry. Philpott’s graph before stated the use of antibiotics in both the meat and poultry production. So why leave out the meat production? The majority of Americans eat more beef and pork than chicken, so why leave it out? These final facts are not cohesive with the original graph and facts stated. To the average reader this just shows that the antibiotic use is rising in both meat and poultry production, but only poultry is where you will find these resistant pathogens. This is