Efforts to slacken antibiotic resistance: Labeling meat products from animals raised without antibiotics in the United States.

As bacteria and diseases spread due to climatic change, greater amounts of antibiotics will be used thereby exacerbating the problem of antibiotic resistance. To help slacken the development of resistant bacteria, the medical community is attempting to reduce unnecessary and excessive usage of antibiotics. One of the targets is the use of antibiotics for enhancing animal growth and promoting feed efficiency in the production of food animals. While governments can adopt regulations prohibiting nontherapeutic uses of antibiotics in food animals and strategies to reduce antibiotic usage, another idea is to publicize when antibiotics are used in food animal production by allowing labeled meat products. This paper builds upon existing labeling and marketing efforts in the United States to show how a government can develop a verified antibiotic-free labeling program that would allow consumers to purchase meat products from animals that had never received antibiotics.