 In a keynote address last year, the Director General of the World Health Organization warned that we may be facing a future in which many of our miracle drugs no longer work. A post-antibiotic era means, in effect, an end to modern medicine as we know it. Things as common as strep throat or a child's scratch knee could once again kill. The Director General's prescription to avoid this catastrophe included a global call to restrict the use of antibiotics in food production to therapeutic purposes. In other words, only use antibiotics in agriculture to treat sick animals. In the United States, meat producers feed literally millions of pounds of antibiotics to farm animals who aren't sick just to promote growth or prevent disease and they often cramp stressful, unhygienic conditions in industrial animal agriculture. The FDA estimates that 80% of the antimicrobial drugs sold in the US every year now go to the meat industry. The discoverer of penicillin warned us back in the 40s that misuse could lead to resistance, but the meat industry didn't listen and started feeding drugs like penicillin to chickens by the ton. The Food and Drug Administration finally wised up to the threat in 1977 and proposed stopping the feeding of penicillin and tetracycline to farm animals. That was 36 years ago. Since then, the combined political power of the factory farming and pharmaceutical industries has effectively thwarted any legislative or regulatory action and this stranglehold shows no sign of breaking. We realize this reckless practice was a public health threat decades ago and yet what's been done about it. Present farm animal production has concentrated in high volume crowded stressful environments made possible in part by the routine use of antibacterial drugs in the feed. The US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment wrote as far back as 1979. Thus, the current dependency on low level use of antibiotics to increase or maintain production while of immediate benefit also could be the Achilles' heel of present production methods. Medical operations use antibiotics as a crutch to compensate for the squalid conditions that now characterize much of modern agribusiness. The unnatural crowding of animals and their waste creates such a strain on the animal's immune systems that normal body processes like growth may be impaired. That's why constant influx of antibiotics is thought to accelerate weight gain by reducing the infectious load. The problem is that each animal feeding on the antibiotic becomes a factory for the production and subsequent dispersion of antibiotic resistant bacteria, offering a whole new meaning to the term factory farm.