LDN - Health and Fitness

White House announces forum to fight antibiotic overuse

[June 02, 2015] By Bill Berkrot

(Reuters) - The U.S. government will hold a forum on Tuesday to help find ways that ensure the responsible use of antibiotics at a time concern is growing that their overuse is creating drug-resistant super bugs that pose a serious risk to public health.

The White House Forum on Antibiotic Stewardship will bring together some 150 representatives from food companies, retailers, drugmakers, farmers, medical societies and others involved in human and animal health to discuss limiting the overuse of antibiotics in livestock, animal feed and humans.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that drug-resistant bacteria, which stop responding to the medicines designed to kill them, cause two million illnesses and about 23,000 deaths each year in the United States alone.

CDC director Thomas Frieden said antibiotic resistance "may be the single most important infectious disease threat of our time."

"If we lose antibiotics, the medicine chest will be empty and it will not only undermine our ability to treat routine infections, but it will undermine much of modern medicine," Frieden said on a conference call with reporters to announce the White House Forum.

"We risk turning back the clock to a world where simple infections can be fatal just as they were a century ago."

Among the topics under discussion will be developing guidelines and recommendations to control the overuse of antibiotics in hospitals and curtail their use in food animals.

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President Obama will also sign a Presidential Memorandum directing Federal departments and agencies to promote meat and poultry produced according to responsible antibiotic-use.

The memorandum would broaden the availability of such products in all Federal cafeterias serving civilian Federal employees by 2018 for poultry and 2020 for other meats.

(Reporting by Bill Berkrot. Editing by Andre Grenon)

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