News & Perspective

(CIDRAP News) – Animal health groups today commended the Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) voluntary approach to reducing the growth-promotion uses of antibiotics in farm animals but voiced some concern that the policy may hurt animal health and lead to higher meat prices.

(CIDRAP News) – Infectious-disease specialty groups are teaming up to call for increased use of antimicrobial stewardship programs, saying such efforts can help preserve the effectiveness of anti-infective drugs while reducing medical costs.

(CIDRAP News) – The US government needs to collect much more data on antibiotic use in food animals and resistant bacteria in animals and retail meat to clarify the possible links between them, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report released this week.

(CIDRAP News) – A multi-national team of researchers has applied a new genomic tool to a 50-year-old bacterial foe, using minute mutations to track the spread of drug-resistant staph both across continents and within a single hospital.

(CIDRAP News) – A Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) official today rejected a media report that quoted her as saying that antiviral-resistant cases of novel H1N1 influenza had been found along the US-Mexican border.

(CIDRAP News) – After a 2-year study of the effects of large-scale farm animal production, a panel of experts has called for phasing out the nontherapeutic use of antimicrobials in farm animals in order to maintain the effectiveness of antibiotics in humans.