The best former FDA commission Donald Kennedy can do — after all these years of hysteria and research — is point to studies that, in the words of their authors, only “could be responsible” for, or “suggest” a link between livestock antibiotics and resistant bacteria.
Kennedy writes in the WaPo:
More antibiotics were sold for use in food animal production in 2011, the last year for which complete data are available, than in any prior year. The FDA annually examines bacteria on retail meat and poultry, and each year the bugs show more resistance to antibiotics. Moreover, several new studies using genetic analysis demonstrate with great precision the evolution and transmission of resistant pathogens not traditionally linked to food. Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus is a troublesome new source of livestock-associated infections, and the E. coli that cause drug-resistant urinary tract infections can also be transmitted to people via food.
OK, where are the bodies? Don’t you love these pecksniffs who like to cry, “The sky is falling”?