Interplay between policy and science regarding low-dose antimicrobial use in livestock

Since the introduction of penicillin in the 1940s, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become an ever-increasing threat to human and animal health (Carlet et al., 2012; ITFAR, 2012). The low-dose antimicrobial use in food-producing animals for production purposes, i.e., disease prevention and growth promotion, has been documented to drive AMR, though the risk to human health from such uses has been a source of a heated debate among stakeholders including industry members, citizen advocacy groups, academics, and public health workers (Davis and Rutkow, 2012). In the United States (US), it remains common practice to use medically-important antibiotics1 for production purposes. Since the 2000s, the European Union (EU) has banned many low-dose antimicrobial uses. The crucial element to the debate has been whether scientific evidence supports similar action in the US. Industrial food animal production advocates, henceforth “industry,” claims that scientific evidence is currently lacking, while other stakeholders argue that a convincing and substantial body of evidence exists to support policy change. The US and the EU have taken vastly different approaches to AMR surveillance and research, and these choices have led to a wide variance in the current policy climate regarding antimicrobial use and AMR. We argue that the EU has prioritized