There's another place to watch for antibiotic overuse: the meat your children are eating, whether beef, pork, turkey or chicken. As a result, the country's leading pediatrics group is calling for farmers to stop using antibiotics to help livestock grow faster.

In a report Monday, the American Academy of Pediatrics detailed the overuse of antibiotics in animals, which can make bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli and Campylobacter stronger and resistant to drugs previously able to fight them off. The federal government has been warning Americans about the dangers of overusing antibiotics in hospitals and of asking doctors to prescribe them when they aren't necessary, but what hasn't received as much widespread attention is the danger that can occur when these medicines are overfed to animals, the academy wrote.

Antibiotics were once considered a miracle drug, opening the door to surgeries that hadn't been possible before, including organ transplants. Before their use, a simple cut could mean death if it became infected. In recent years, however, the overuse of these drugs has become a major global threat that the World Health Organization has drawn attention to, reporting also on Monday that its latest survey results show these superbugs are widely misunderstood.



In a farm setting, caretakers administer antibiotics and hormones to animals to fight infections, but also for nonmedical purposes, including to make animals grow faster while simultaneously feeding them less. As a result of overexposure, animals can develop infections that drugs cannot fight, the same way humans can when they eat foods that have been contaminated by bacteria.

Bacteria can spread to other livestock in contaminated quarters, and when the animals are slaughtered for meat and delivered to supermarkets, children can become exposed by eating infected meat. Farm workers or people who visit farms can also become infected. If the infectious bacteria is drug resistant, any drugs given in a hospital or at the doctor's office would be ineffective.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each year more than 2 million Americans become sick because of drug-resistant bacteria, and more than 23,000 of them die. For most infections, incidence is highest among children younger than 5, the academy says.

Many of the drugs used to combat infections are the same in humans as they are in animals, but humans – who themselves are given too many antibiotics – still use significantly fewer than animals do. In 2012, more than 32.2 million pounds of antibiotics were used in animals, compared with 7.25 million pounds of these medicines used in humans. While humans need a prescription from a doctor to access antibiotics, nearly all drugs used in animals do not need a prescription from a vet and can be bought over the counter.

"The indiscriminate use of antibiotics without a prescription or the input of a veterinarian puts the health of children at risk," Dr. Jerome Paulson, one of the authors of the report and past chairperson of the academy's executive committee of the Council on Environmental Health, said in a statement.

In recent years epidemiologists have been able to link the overuse of drugs in animals to infections they have found in humans. These have included methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, in turkey, pork, chicken and beef. People also have gotten MRSA from exposure to livestock, and exposure to E. coli in animals has led to urinary tract infections in humans, and to sepsis, which is commonly called "blood poisoning."

Parents who want to buy meat that doesn't have these added antibiotics must look for organic certifications from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, specifying that no growth hormones or antibiotics have been used.