The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has ordered an Irasburg farm to stop selling cows and bull calves for slaughter after excessive amounts of antibiotics were found in the meat.
Lawson Farms is prohibited from selling or introducing any article of food, excluding milk, to the commercial market until it has met a series of FDA requirements, court documents show.
The ban was filed in collaboration with the Department of Justice and U.S. District Court in Burlington on July 8 and regards animals sold by Lawson Farms. Owner Robert Lawson and manager George Lawson and Lonnie A. Griffin were charged with keeping incomplete records of drug dosages after meat from the farm showed high doses of antibiotics.
“The FDA continues to take strong enforcement actions against companies that put consumers’ health at risk,” said Melinda K. Plaisier, the FDA’s acting associate commissioner for regulatory affairs, in a statement on Monday. “The actions we took are necessary to ensure that foods do not contain illegal residues of drugs and are safe for consumers.”
Lawson Farms has been on FDA’s radar for a while. In 2005, the FDA sent the farm a warning letter after samples from a slaughtered dairy cow from the farm were found to have 0.10 parts per million of penicillin in kidney tissue and 0.19 parts per million in liver samples. The maximum level allowed for penicillin is 0.05 parts per million, according to the FDA’s Code of Federal Regulations.
When tissue samples from 2012 also showed excessive levels of penicillin, and the farm failed to present complete records that indicated when and by which employee the drugs were administered, the FDA decided to issue the restriction.
In order to start selling cattle again, the farm must meet a series of requirements stated in the court filing. Among them is to establish and implement a system that ensures that each of the animals is individually identified by a tag number.
Lawson is also required to keep a record system that distinguishes between medicated and un-medicated animals, and prevents the farm from selling animals whose edible tissues contain drugs in amounts above the allowed level.
Farmers often give low doses of antibiotics over a long period of time to help the animal grow faster. Some scientific studies, however, show that antibiotics stay in the meat and that consumers eating meat treated with antibiotics increase their risk for developing drug-resistant illnesses.
This concern has been raised by many scientists, among them Dr. Frederick J. Angulo, who in an article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, wrote that “Antibiotics are a finite and precious resource, and we need to promote prudent and judicious antibiotic use.”
The FDA has been working to control meat and poultry producers’ use of antibiotics in recent years. In 2012, the FDA issued new guidelines asking, but not requiring, that companies stop touting antibiotics as growth promoters and indicate their use is for disease prevention only.
“When farms fail to maintain appropriate controls concerning the medication of food-producing animals, they jeopardize the public health,” said Stuart F. Delery, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Division in a June 30 statement. “We are committed to making sure food producers have put in place the procedures and documentation necessary to help ensure that consumers receive safe foods for their family table.”
Lawson Farms did not return a request for comment.
