Dr. Dorman’s Blog

I am deeply troubled by the increasing call to eliminate the use of antibiotics to prevent disease in animals. As a veterinarian focused on the health of animals, I can say without question that if we lose the ability to use antibiotics for prevention purposes, more animals will die.

Eating meat that contains antibiotics? Despite the number of questions on this topic asked on Google, it’s not a problem. That’s because safeguards, which start on the farm and extend into the processing plant, are in place to ensure meat doesn’t contain unsafe drug residues, including from antibiotics.

Some antibiotics are approved for use in animals, others in people, and still others in both animals and people (also called shared class antibiotics), but the majority of antibiotics used in animals are non-critical to human medicine.