Under a proposal now before the Food and Drug Administration, antibiotics designated as medically important for treating humans might be allowed to be used to combat greening in Florida citrus. And that's a bad idea.

The overuse of antibiotics is a sobering reality to which the world is slowly awakening.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization and United Nations have all concluded that the unchecked escalation of antibiotic resistance is one of the world's most pressing public health problems — an unfolding crisis that has been fueled, in part, by the skyrocketing use of antibiotics in factory-farmed animals across the globe.

Yet, though the United Nations last year went so far as to call the unprecedented acceleration of antibiotic resistance the world's most urgent global threat, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is currently considering a request from a pesticide company to permanently approve the medically important antibiotic oxytetracycline for use as a pesticide in citrus production.

Oxytetracycline and streptomycin are both considered critical to protecting human health worldwide. But the EPA granted an emergency exemption allowing their use to suppress a citrus greening disease that has spread to groves across Florida.

Now the pesticide company NuFarm Americas Inc. has requested that the EPA permanently register oxytetracycline to approve its ongoing use as a herbicide on crops like grapefruits, oranges and tangerines.

Without question, citrus greening, which has quickly spread across the state since 2005, poses significant challenges for the citrus industry. Orange crop yields are down by more than a third in some areas.

But expanding the use of medically significant antibiotics like oxytetracycline as a pesticide, just as leading health experts worldwide are sounding the alarm to dramatically reduce their use, would carelessly contribute to a much larger problem than it is trying to fix.

And make no mistake, the problem is immense: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that more than 2 million people are infected with antibiotic-resistant organisms each year, leading to an estimated 23,000 deaths.

There is universal agreement that restricting the use of medically important drugs is key to reversing an upswing of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that in humans can cause everything from troubling staph infections like MRSA to gonorrhea and tuberculosis, just to name a few.

As the EPA's public comment period on the NuFarm Americas request closed earlier this month, the Center for Biological Diversity, where I work, joined the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future in urging the EPA to reject the request.

Oxytetracycline and streptomycin are among a group of antibiotics that have quite literally transformed human and veterinary medicine, making once-lethal infections curable.

For that reason, for more than a decade the FDA and the World Health Organization have designated these two drugs as being "highly important" or "critically important" to human medicine — including streptomycin playing a vital global role in combating tuberculosis.

Exposure to antibiotics also poses serious health risks for wildlife, and antibiotics accumulating in the environment can cause changes in the chemical composition and pH of waters and soils, altering the long-evolved balance of ecosystems that helps keep species healthy.

Given the significance of the well-documented risks, in a different era it might be safe to assume that the EPA leaders entrusted to protect public and environmental health over industry profits would carefully weigh the dangerous precedent set by approving the permanent use of an antibiotic as a pesticide.

But EPA chief Scott Pruitt has already made clear where his loyalties lie. One of his first decisions as EPA administrator was to reverse his own scientists' recommendations to dramatically expand restrictions on the use of Dow's brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos. With little explanation, Pruitt authorized the ongoing agricultural use of the dangerous pesticide, which just two weeks ago poisoned at least 12 workers in California.

Shortly after Dow's victory on reversing the chlorpyrifos ban, the chemical giant sent a letter asking Pruitt to simply undo four years of research showing the pesticide harms over 97 percent of endangered species, a request the agency is now considering.

To date, there's no indication anyone in the Trump administration even has a grasp of the growing body of evidence making clear that we can't simply dump more pesticides on every agricultural concern without contributing to an even bigger problem.

That's all the more troubling when the "pesticide" the EPA is considering approving is an antibiotic that plays a vital role in protecting human health.

Hannah Connor is a senior attorney in the St. Petersburg office of the Center for Biological Diversity.