Food Safety

Food Safety

Animal Medicines & Food Safety

Research shows that healthy animals are an important step in providing safer food. In other words, food safety begins on the farm. Just like people, animals can get sick and may require medicines to treat their conditions and, more importantly, medicines are needed to prevent and control disease outbreaks. That’s why it is essential for veterinarians to continue to have a broad range of animal medicines available as one of the tools in the fight against foodborne illnesses.

Animal Medicines: An Important Link in the Food Safety Chain

• Animal medicines used to keep animals healthy must be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in the case of pharmaceuticals, or the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), in the case of vaccines.  

• Veterinarians and farmers work together on the farm to carefully use medicines to keep animals healthy. Guidelines have been developed in consultation with the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help farmers make sound decisions about the use of medicines.

• The FDA also sets strict guidelines for how medicines can be used, including withdrawal times – periods of time prior to harvest when the medicine cannot be used to ensure that medicine residues that violate strict limits don’t end up in the food.

• Veterinary inspectors check animals before and after slaughter, visually and physically examining more than 6 billion poultry carcasses and 125 million livestock carcasses each year. There are more than 1,100 federal veterinarians conducting inspections each day.

• Federal inspectors also monitor products during processing, handling and packaging to ensure that they are safe and accurately labeled.

• USDA has monitoring systems in place to ensure that animal medicine residues above strict limits are not in meat products. FDA, USDA and CDC work together to track the development of any antibiotic resistant bacteria.
  

Why are medicines needed for food-producing animals?

• To prevent diseases – Vaccines and pharmaceuticals are needed to prevent and control infectious diseases among livestock and poultry.

• To treat sick animals – Antibiotics are necessary for the treatment of sick animals and to prevent the spread of disease to other livestock.

• To control outbreaks – Veterinarians use medicines to control internal and external parasites in animals.
  
  

The Future of Food Safety

Pre-harvest vaccines are truly innovative agents capable of vastly improving the safety of food in the United States as it travels from farm to fork. These vaccines can be easily administered by farmers to their livestock to greatly reduce the prevalence of harmful foodborne pathogens like E. coli, campylobacter and salmonella.

While significant progress has been made in reducing these bacteria in processing, reducing the amount of bacteria one step earlier — at the farms — will help in the fight against food-borne illness.

Certain organisms do not cause clinical diseases in food animals but can cause human disease if they are transmitted to humans via meat products. Pre-harvest vaccines, however, are promising and effective tools for livestock producers to combat these organisms, and to help promote and maintain food safety. 

What do other experts say?