Concerned that illegal antibiotics might also be contaminating the milk Americans drink, the US Food and Drug Administration planned tests this month on the milk from farms that had repeatedly sold cows tainted by drug residue. However, these plans have met with fierce protest from the dairy industry, which says that it could force farmers to needlessly dump millions of gallons of milk while they waited for test results. Industry officials and state regulators said the testing program was poorly conceived and could lead to costly recalls that could be avoided with a better plan for testing.
In response, the FDA postponed the testing, and now the two sides are sparring over how much danger the antibiotics pose and the best way to ensure that the drugs do not end up in the milk supply. “What has been served up, up to this point, by the FDA has been potentially very damaging to innocent dairy farmers,” says John Wilson, a senior vice president for Dairy Farmers of America, the nation’s largest dairy cooperative. He said that that the nation’s milk was safe and that there was little reason to think that the slaughterhouse findings would be replicated in tests of the milk supply.
The FDA says that it will confer with the industry before deciding how to proceed. “The agency remains committed to gathering the information necessary to address its concern with respect to this important potential public health issue,” it said in a statement.
The concerns of federal regulators stem from tests done by the Department of Agriculture on dairy cows sent to be slaughtered at meat plants. For years, those tests have found a small but persistent number of animals with drug residues, mostly antibiotics, that violate legal limits.
The tests found 788 dairy cows with residue violations in 2008, the most recent year for which data was available. That was a tiny fraction of the 2.6 million dairy cows slaughtered that year, but regulators say the violations are warning signs because the problem persists from year to year and some of the drugs detected are not approved for use in dairy cows.
The question for the FDA is whether cows that are producing milk also have improper levels of such drugs in their bodies and whether traces of those drugs are getting into the milk. Federal officials have discussed expanded testing for years. But industry executives said that it was not until recently that the FDA told them it was finally going to begin.
The problem, from the industry’s point of view, is the lengthy time it takes for test results. The tests currently done for antibiotics in milk take just minutes to complete. But the new tests could take a week or more to determine if the drugs were present in the milk. By that time, the milk could already be on-shelf and lead to recalls, the industry notes.