From: Millard Susman [msusman@facstaff.wisc.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2001 5:35 PM
To: EXECSEC
Subject: Antibiotics

TO: 	 Jane E. Henney, M.D.
	Commissioner
	U. S. Food and Drug Administration

FROM:	Millard Susman
	Professor, Laboratory of Genetics
	University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dear Dr. Henney:

	Today's article in the New York Times concerning the 
agricultural use of antibiotics was disturbing.   I am a microbial 
geneticist and have known about multiple drug resistance in bacteria 
for most of the 40+ years that I have been in this field.  There is 
certainly good reason to think that excessive use of antibiotics in 
agriculture will select for resistant bacteria and for 
drug-resistance plasmids.   These plasmids, which travel with 
remarkable ease from bacterium to bacterium, often crossing species 
and genus boundaries, have been a serious medical problem for years. 
There is certainly good reason to believe that this problem could be 
exacerbated by the indiscriminate use of antibiotics on animal farms.
	The article in the New York Times revealed a terrible gap in 
our knowledge concerning the level of use of antibiotics in animal 
agriculture and in medicine.  Evidently, the data are so unreliable 
that we do not know whether the use on farms is more or less than 
than the use in medicine.   People who should be experts in this area 
offer estimates that differ by an order of magnitude!
	Surely this is an issue that deserves the attention of the 
Food and Drug Administration.    We need a better system for tracking 
the use of antibiotics and for assessing the biological impact of 
that use.


-- 
Millard Susman
Professor, Laboratory of Genetics
Director, Center for Biology Education
507 Genetics Building
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706
Campus phone number: (608) 263-5075
FAX: (608) 262-2976