Probably, the last thing many of you chose to worry about during the recent Christmas/New Years break wasn't the quality of the food you ate at Grandma's house. It's understandable, given the dicey travelling, bad weather and forced friendliness among the inlaws and "outlaws" of your extended family. But you should be concerned, and not only because Grandma's kitchen may not be nearly as clean as the average restaurant either.

In the two weeks leading up to the holiday break were a pair of reports, first from the FDA that, very thankfully, Wired columnist Maryn McKenna didn't miss about the massive amount of Antimicrobials Sold or Distributed For Use in Food-Producing Animals in 2009. Although nobody had a good handle on the amount of antibiotics used in agriculture on animals from a historical perspective before now, I'm not sure anyone thought the very first estimate issued by the FDA would be about 200,000 pounds shy of 29 MILLION.

Even more alarming was a follow-up report from the Center for a Livable Future based on the organization's request to the FDA for an estimate about how many pounds of antibiotics were sold for human use. The agency's 7.28 MILLION-pound estimate for human use represented a quarter of the number sold for animal use, a figure that's all the more sobering, because farmers bought more tetracycline (10.1 MILLION pounds) for their farm animals.

No wonder, the overuse of antibiotics like tetracycline on animals has led to increasing problems with bacterial resistance, specifically methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, also known as MRSA (a strain of infection that's resistant to broad-spectrum antibiotics).

Have you considered incorporating more organic foods into your diet? Maybe, you should.

Center For a Livable Future December 23, 2010

Wired/Superbug December 24, 2010

Wired/Superbug December 9, 2010