FDA policy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

FDA policy - Essay Example FDA policies regarding raising chicken FDA defines precisely how chicken should be raised in terms of the treatment given and the methods used to keep them. Its policies outline how antibiotics should be used or should not be used in poultry production. This is to slow down the development of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. The agency has trumpeted the policies as the beginning of termination of the misuse of drugs on chicken (Allport-Settle 30). However, the FDA missed the point. While the policies call for the end of using antibiotics to make chicken grow faster, they approve continuous use of such drugs to compensate for unsanitary and overcrowded conditions and prevent diseases at firm operations that produce poultry food. The prophylactic or preventive use of antibiotics resembles their use for growth promotion including similar low doses that are equally responsible in the antibiotic resistance. The FDA encourages the use of preventive drugs necessary to assure chic ken health. Left unaddressed is whatever that makes this use ‘necessary’. The use of antibiotics to make chicken grow faster seems to be in its last stages, though much will depend on how rapidly drug companies comply with the policies and whether the food poultry industry complies at all. According to the public health advocates, the fight now shifts to the use of such drugs to prevent diseases. This is a much steeper hill to scale; their misuse lies at the center of industrial food poultry production, yet the FDA has renounced its responsibility to stop it. In 2005, FDA banned the use of fluoroquinolone in poultry production in the US to reduce the occurrence of fluoroquinolone-resistant Campylobacter. However, little is known regarding the potential effectiveness of this policy (Luangtongkum 72). A research was conducted with an objective of following temporal changes in the occurrences of Campylobacter among chicken from two conservative producers who declared their termination of fluoroquinolone use in 2002, only three years before the FDA’s ban. Another objective was the occurrence of this antibiotic disease in conventional chicken products to those from producers who do not use antibiotics. Chicken samples were collected from three antibiotic-free keepers and two conventional chicken keepers over the course of five months in 2004 and 15 weeks in 2006. Fluoroquinolone resistance rates were compared among Campylobacter isolates from the diverse producers. From the results, it was established that there was no major change in the percentage of fluoroquinolone-resistant Campylobacter segregates from the two conventional keepers over the period of study. Further, Campylobacter strains from both producers were significantly more probable to resist fluoroquinolone compared to those from the antibiotic-free ones. Therefore, fluoroquinolone-resistant Campylobacter might be persistent contaminants of chicken products even after ceasing to use on-farm fluoroquinolone. The FDA’s ban on the use of this antibiotic in chicken rising may therefore be insufficient in reducing resistant Campylobacter in chicken products. FDA policies regarding genetically engineering corn For about two decades, FDA has been analyzing genetic modification methods for drug-biological growth as well as the development of new foodstuffs. The agency has carefully created policies to accommodate the evolving and changing world of biotechnology.