"Very Promiscuous Orange Trees" A conversation on antibiotic overuse in plant agriculture

Superbugs Unplugged

You have heard of antibiotic overuse in food animal production, but wait until you get a load of spraying antibiotics on citrus trees.

In the United States, the use of medically important antibiotics on crops has more than quadrupled from 2000 to 2017 and the problem is only getting worse. The EPA recently greenlighted the potential spraying of more than 650,000 pounds of streptomycin, a critically important antibiotic, on citrus crops in Florida and California. This is bad news for antibiotic resistance.

This month, Nathan Donley, a senior scientist from the Center for Biological Diversity, joins Dr. Lance B. Price and guest co-host, Sydney Riess, to discuss why antibiotics are being used in citrus in the first place and how the practice may be contributing to the antibiotic resistance crisis we are in. Maybe its just us, but air-blasting medically important antibiotics out the back of a pick-up truck all over citrus trees seems like a recipe for disaster.

Ready to take action? Add your name to this petition urging the EPA to stop spraying medically important antibiotics on citrus crops:

https://uspirg.webaction.org/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=43218