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 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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