New Scientist - Farmers in the US may soon be prevented from dosing healthy livestock with antibiotics that encourage faster growth. Pressure to ban the practice has fallen on the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) following a court ruling and the publication of research showing how a strain of bacteria jumped from humans to farmyard animals and back again, picking up antibiotic resistance on the way.
The court ruling, won by the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York, commits the FDA to reconsider a ban first proposed in 1977 on the non-therapeutic farmyard use of penicillin and two other types of antibiotics called tetracyclines in animal feed. More
