Animal Drug Human Food Safety Toxicology and Antimicrobial Resistance—The Square Peg

Abstract

This paper presents the traditional approach for the evaluation of human food safety used for animal drugs intended for food animals, and describes some of the difficulties posed by antimicrobial drug resistance. Like human drugs, animal drugs must be safe and effective for the patient. However, unlike human drugs, food derived from animals treated with the animal drug must also be shown to be safe for human consumption. The Food and Drug Administration has come to realize that antimicrobial drugs used in the treatment of the food animal have the potential to create a unique residue—increased numbers of microorganism that are resistant to antimicrobial drug treatment. The traditional toxicological paradigm for chemical residues does not apply to this unique microbiological residue. Information useful to a food safety evaluation may include the potential for the animal antimicrobial drug to diminish the susceptibility of microorganisms to human antimicrobial drugs, any human medical use of the drug, relationship to other human antimicrobial drugs, and the ability of the animal drug to alter the susceptibility of relevant microorganism to important human antimicrobial drugs. Yet to be developed are standardized approaches to quantify an acceptable level of resistant microorganism in food and to mitigate the hazard to assure that there is a reasonable certainty of no harm following the consumption of the edible food derived from the treated animal.