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Animal Drug Abuse Involves Vet, Dairies

By Dan Flynn and Suzanna Schreck

The same week the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) came out with draft guidelines to reduce the development of resistance to medically important antimicrobial drugs used in food animal production, it released recently sent warning letters to a veterinarian and two dairy farms that underscore the problem.

In a May 28 warning letter, FDA said Croghan, NY veterinarian Samuel Yancey caused a 20 percent Phenylbute injection, a drug approved for uses in horses only, to be given to a dairy cow age 20 months or older that was being sold for slaughter as food.

FDA said that was a prohibited use of the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug.

The New York state vet was given 15 days to tell FDA how he is going to stay in compliance with federal laws governing the "extricable" use of drugs in animal agriculture.   FDA said it was especially concerned about the withdrawal time prior to slaughter to ensure that drugs are not getting into meat consumed by humans.

The two latest dairy farms warned for animal drug abuse are the Thomas Schantz Farm in Castorland, NY and the Busman Dairy in Jerome, ID, which received letters, respectively, dated May 25 and June 9.   Both were released this week.

Schantz shipped a dairy cow last Aug. 6 that was slaughtered for human food.  Tissue samples from the cow's kidney showed evidence of 8888.0 parts per million (ppm) phenylbutazone, a very powerful anti-inflammatory drug.

FDA has not established any tolerance level for the animal drug in cattle that are intended for human consumption.

Schantz was also cited for using Phenylbutazone, the horse drug, in a 58-month old cow and misusing penicillin G.

"Our investigation also found you hold animals under conditions that are so inadequate that medicated animals bearing potentially harmful drug residues are likely to enter the food supply," the warning letter to the New Your dairy farm said.

Idaho's Busman Dairy sold a dairy cow last Dec. 22 that tissue sample tests showed the liver contained 0.62 ppm sulfamethazine.  The FDA tolerance level for the sulfonamide drug used to treat bacterial diseases in both human and veterinary medicine is 0.1 ppm.

Investigators visited the Idaho dairy in March.

The two dairies were also given 15 working days to get back to FDA with information on how they are going to get back into compliance with federal law and regulations.

Full post as published by Food Safety News on July 01, 2010 (boomark / email).