On March 4, 2015, McDonald's USA announced that by 2017 all the chicken it buys will have been raised without antibiotics important to human medicine. "That's a huge public health win," says Dr. Gail Hansen, a senior officer for The Pew Charitable Trusts antibiotic resistance project.
Overuse of antibiotics in food animals presents a serious and growing threat to human health, because the practice creates new strains of dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or superbugs. So McDonald's new move is a "big deal," Hansen says.
But there's more work to be done. For example, other restaurant chains could mirror McDonald's new policy, poultry producers could make more antibiotics-use data public, and McDonald's could extend its new antibiotics policy to beef and pork.
For more facts, read McDonald's Antibiotics Announcement Is Big Public Health News.