IN THE MOVIE SLEEPER, when Woody Allen wakes up in the distant future, the first thing the doctor does is offer him a cigarette. Woody demurs, and the doctor persists: "It’s tobacco. It’s one of the best things for you." If the movie were remade today, the doctor might well offer Woody a hamburger to go with the smoke; in forty years, perhaps the funny prop would be a drumstick. In the last few months, mad cow disease (the nickname of bovine spongiform encephalopathy) has put thousands in Europe off their steak, and has resulted in the slaughter of suspect herds and stricter regulation on both sides of the Atlantic (the French solution -- in keeping with the incomprehensible Gallic love of bureaucracy -- has included official "cattle passports" at butcher shops, showing the provenance and history of your roti de boeuf). Last week, though, the FDA held hearings on a more worrisome and insidious -- if less headline-friendly -- food safety issue: the overuse of antibiotics in American livestock.

Antibiotic use in general has been growing precipitously. Consider not merely prescriptions, but also the increase in cleaning products that contain antibacterial agents, which are thought to breed drug-resistant strains of bacteria. At least a third of antibiotics produced in the United States, however, are dispensed not to people at all, but to livestock. Some are used to treat sick animals, but farmers, particularly poultry farmers, will often give antibiotics to an entire chicken house when not all of the birds are sick. A National Chicken Council spokesman has explained, "You can’t go out into a chicken house and ask the sick birds to raise a wing so they can get a shot. The only thing a grower can do is add it to the water and treat the whole house." Antibiotics are also given as growth promoters, which increase animals’ weight-gain-to-feed ratio, thus bringing them more quickly (and cheaply) to slaughter weight.

Not surprisingly, such widespread use of antibiotics in livestock has promoted drug-resistant strains of once easily treatable bacteria found in meat and poultry. The Centers for Disease Control reported that resistant strains of bacteria that cause food poisoning have increased for the third consecutive year. A Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) study estimates that the campylobacter bacteria is present in nearly 80 percent of all broiler chickens sold in the United States; a common cause of food poisoning, campylobacter sickens over 2,400,000 and kills about 500 Americans per year. In 1998, 18 percent of campylobacter cultures were found to be resistant to quinolones, the drugs used to fight it. Similarly, resistant strains of salmonella rose from 1% of all salmonella bacteria in 1980 to 34 percent in 1996. Salmonella is present in a fifth of all broiler chickens sold.

During last week’s hearing, the FDA moved to ban the poultry industry’s use of quinolones and proposed more careful scrutiny of other antibiotics. Any signs of antibiotic-resistant bacteria will lead to a moratorium on farm use of the particular drug, according to the proposed regulation. These moves are laudable, but hardly conclusive: The FDA has no enforcement mechanism and relies on statistics that come from the meat industries themselves, whose reliability is questionable. (An independent study by the UCS showed that antibiotics use was forty percent higher than official agriculture industry figures.) More importantly, the FDA's regulations will have to receive congressional approval before becoming law, and given the recent fondness of the livestock, poultry, and pharmaceutical manufacturing industries for Republicans, we're unlikely to see sweeping regulatory changes in the next four years. All three industries gave over seventy percent of their political contributions to Republicans in the 2000 election cycle, which added up to over twenty million dollars. The incoming president was the top political beneficiary of all three industries’ munificence. Poultry industry advocates and antibiotic manufacturers argue that the increase in resistance may stem from overprescription in hospitals; this is at best a dodge and at worst an outright lie. Still, the story probably seems infinitely more credible when campaign dollars tell it.