The meat industry consumes four fifths of antibiotics

I am absolutely against the thoughtless, standard practice of using antibiotics when there is no indication of need (ie an animal presenting disease symptoms necessitating treatment) - it is leading to an excess of antibiotic run-off in watersheds which in turn is leading to increased antibiotic resistance which will come back to bite us all in the ass hard down the road. We can't come up with new antibiotics faster than organisms can adapt to them and we will start dying of multi-drug resistant bacteria in greater numbers if we don't stop our practices.

Antibiotics are unnecessary as long as common sense, safe practices are implemented in raising food stock. Have ample space, adequate shelter, fresh food, and closely monitor, isolate, and treat those that become sick. Antibiotic use encourages laziness (in both inhumane treatment of raising animals in crowded unsanitary conditions and in processing meat to eat - cook it to a proper temp to kill any contamination, sorry rare-meat lovers, take your risks yourself), produces false confidence, and likely has many other subtle effects that we are yet unable to prove because we can't perform large enough epidemiological surveys (increases in metabolic disease and hyper-immune system disease rates like lupus, arthritis, asthma, allergies, etc are very likely due to the constant low-levels of antibiotics existing in the environment).

Consumer Reports: Antibiotics are widely used by U.S. meat industry
Our investigation finds that shoppers have lots of ‘no antibiotics’ choices, but they have to learn how to decipher product labeling
Published: June 2012

The declining effectiveness of antibiotics has become a national public-health crisis, leading doctors and scientists to call for much more careful use of antibiotics so that disease-causing organisms don’t become immune to them. But since approximately 80 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are used by the meat and poultry industry to make animals grow faster or to prevent disease in crowded and unsanitary conditions, both supermarkets and consumers can have a major impact on this problem through their purchasing decisions.

Science: WHO Advises Kicking the Livestock Antibiotic Habit
Dan Ferber
Science 22 August 2003:
Vol. 301 no. 5636 p. 1027
DOI: 10.1126/science.301.5636.1027

Eliminating the routine use of antibiotics in livestock reduces human health risks without significantly harming animal health or farmers' incomes, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) report released last week. The report adds to a growing momentum to end the use of antibiotics to promote growth in farm animals.

European officials have already moved to end the use of growth-promoting antibiotics. By 1999, the E.U. had banned five drugs that are identical or closely related to human medicines.

No such ban is on the table in the United States, where the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) rules on antibiotics on a case-by-case, use-by-use basis, says Stephen Sundlof, director of the agency's Center for Veterinary Medicine.

Livestock Feed Ban Preserves Drugs' Power
Dan Ferber
Science 4 January 2002:
Vol. 295 no. 5552 pp. 27-28
DOI: 10.1126/science.295.5552.27a

It's no secret that livestock fed antibiotics breed drug-resistant bacteria that can cause dangerous infections in people. But a new study suggests that the process is reversible. Banning a drug called avoparcin from animal feed dramatically reduced the chances that potentially dangerous gut microbes in hospital patients would be resistant to an important, related drug, Belgian researchers reported last month at a meeting* sponsored by the American Society for Microbiology.

The results are the first to show that cutting antibiotic use on the farm leads to reduced resistance in hospital patients—those who need antibiotics the most, says microbiologist Stuart Levy of Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston. “This says there's a strong connection between what's done in animals and what you see in people,” he says.

Want more detailed studies: go to ncbi.nlm.nih.gov and search for antibiotic livestock or antibiotic resistance. You'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about the mechanisms of resistance development and what it means for our population.