Some of the milk on the supermarket shelves might contain illegal antibiotics, according to a report from the Food and Drug Administration that claim a small percent of farmers are giving cows antibiotics that the routine tests don’t even try to detect. The findings show that the drugs are undetected because they are not supposed to be used on dairy cows at all.
The FDA looked for 31 different drugs in samples of milk from almost 2,000 dairy farms and about half of the farms are suspected for sending cows to slaughter that turned out to have drug residues in their meat, NPR reports.
From the targeted group, just over over 1 percent of the samples contained drug residues. The most common drug detected was Florfenicol, along with other five drugs that are not approved for use in lactating dairy cows. While two of the drugs – Ciproflaxacin and Sulfamethazine – are “totally illegal” for farmers to use, the other have a more complicated situation because farmers cannot use them on their own, but veterinarians are allowed to authorize their use. In this case, veterinarians should also be sure that no residues enter the food supply.
However, FDA cannot send investigators to the farms because the survey was carried out for research purposes and the samples were collected anonymously. But the officials are not actually worried because the violations are uncommon and the low number indicates that their rules are working well.
“These are encouraging findings,” said Dr. William Flynn, deputy director for science policy in the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine.
Antibiotic use in lactating cows is a violation of food safety rules because cows, unlike hogs, cattle or chickens, receive drugs only when they are actually sick, otherwise drug residues immediately appear in the milk. Usually, the milk is tested for six of the most widely used antibiotics and when farmers know they have treated cows, they just discard their milk for several days until the residues disappear.