Obama Seeks to Double Funding to Fight Antibiotic Resistance

President Barack Obama on Friday urged Congress to double the funding to confront the danger of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, calling it a major public health issue that, if left unchecked, would "cause tens of thousands of deaths, millions of illnesses." The administration also issued a new plan for attacking the problem, part of a national strategy that Obama laid out in an executive order in September. The plan calls for improved surveillance of outbreaks, better diagnostic tests and new research on alternative drugs. It also urges government agencies to bolster systems to track the consumption of antibiotics and to reduce inappropriate use in people and animals. "We take antibiotics for granted for a lot of illnesses that can be deadly and debilitating," Obama said after meeting at the White House with members of his council on science and technology. "Part of the solution is not just finding replacements for traditional antibiotics but also making sure we use antibiotics properly." When the executive order was issued last year, experts praised the administration for focusing on a problem that infectious disease doctors had been warning about for years. But many said the strategy should have recommended tougher measures against the overuse of antibiotics in agriculture, which, they argue, is a substantial part of the problem. The new plan's strength, experts said, is its actions to curb use in humans. It calls on federal agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to create a tougher surveillance system to monitor the use of antibiotics in hospitals and other medical settings. It includes specific steps that hospitals participating in Medicaid and Medicare must take to reduce inappropriate use. "The news here is that the administration is setting specific, annual milestones for tackling the problem," said Allan Coukell, the senior director for health programs at the Pew Charitable Trusts, a Washington-based research and advocacy group that contributed to the administration strategy outlined in September. Americans use more antibiotics than people in other industrialized nations, with rates more than twice those in Germany and the Netherlands, according to Pew. The White House said the president wanted to double the amount of federal funding for combating and preventing antibiotic resistance to more than $1.2 billion. Health advocates and many experts, however, remained unimpressed by the proposed actions on antibiotic use in animals. The Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, said in a statement that the plan "continues to allow the routine feeding of antibiotics to animals that live in the crowded conditions endemic to industrial farms." Researchers have been warning for years that antibiotics - miracle drugs that changed the course of human health in the 20th century - are losing their power because of overuse. Some warn that if the trend is not halted, the world could return to the time before antibiotics, when it was common for people to die from ordinary infections and for children not to survive ailments like strep throat. One problem has been a lack of data, but the plan released Friday lacks specifics on how that would be addressed. More than 70 percent of the antibiotics sold in the United States goes to chicken, pigs, cows and other animals that people eat, yet producers of meat and poultry are not required to report how they use the drugs - which ones, on what types of animals and in what quantities. This makes it difficult to document the precise relationship between routine antibiotic use in animals and antibiotic-resistant infections in people, scientists say. The plan calls for "enhanced summary reports on the sale of distribution and antibiotics" used in food animals but without spelling out how that would be done. "What's being presented is so vague that it's hard to tell how useful it would be," said Keeve Nachman, the director of the Food Production and Public Health Program at the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. "There's nothing really novel being presented."Image Courtesy: Associated Press © 2015 New York Times News Service