Sherrod Brown: “this amendment concerns antibiotic resistance from the use of antibiotics in livestock. I would like to start with a…”

“this amendment concerns antibiotic resistance from the use of antibiotics in livestock. I would like to start with a story. Imagine your 7-year-old daughter is very sick from food poisoning. You take her to the hospital and antibiotics do not help. In a week, she dies a painful death. The autopsy shows that her body is riddled with E. coli bacteria which ate away at her organs from her brain down. This is a true story, and it happened to a family in northeast Ohio 2 years ago. We thought we were winning the war against infectious diseases. With the introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, humans gained an overwhelming advantage in the fight against bacteria that cause infectious diseases, but the war is not over. Mr. Chairman, 2 weeks ago, the World Health Organization issued a ringing warning against antibiotic resistance. Around the world, microbes are mutating at an alarming rate into the new strains that fail to respond to drugs. Dr. Marcos Esponal of the World Health Organization said, "we already have lost some of the current good antibiotics, streptomycin for TB; it's almost lost. Chloroquin for malaria, it's lost; penicillin, nobody uses it now; if we keep the same pace, we will be losing other potent and powerful drugs. So a window of opportunity is closing, and I would say if we don't act now, in 5 to 10 years, we will have a major crisis"; words from the World Health Organization. We need to develop, Mr.…”