From the Archives: Food Animals, Human Infections and ‘The Trouble with Antibiotics’

By the time the FRONTLINE documentary The Trouble with Antibiotics was released in 2014, correspondent David E. Hoffman had spent two years investigating the emergence and spread of bacteria that were increasingly resistant to even the strongest antibiotics.

He had reported on how outbreaks of such “nightmare bacteria” were paralyzing some of America’s best hospitals and killing more than 20,000 people in the U.S. annually, and how they were being fueled by antibiotic overuse.

The more he looked into it, the more he realized there could be more to the story.

“It turns out most antibiotics aren’t even used by humans,” Hoffman said in The Trouble with Antibiotics. “They’re used on farms.”

Antibiotics had been used for years to promote food animals’ health and growth in industrial-scale animal agriculture and had helped reduce the cost of meat — but had also raised concerns. In the 2014 documentary, which is newly available to watch on FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, Hoffman explored emerging scientific research that focused on whether widespread use of antibiotics on farms might be fueling a crisis of antibiotic resistant infections in people.

“Anywhere you use antibiotics, you’re going to have resistance and propagate resistance,” Tom Chiller, M.D., then an associate director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Hoffman. Yet, Chiller said at the time, “It’s very challenging to link the use of a particular antibiotic in a particular herd of animals to a particular human illness. I mean, that is really the challenge.”

The Trouble with Antibiotics examined research tackling that scientific challenge, including the work of a team in Flagstaff, Arizona, that sought to explore whether a rise in urinary tract infections that were increasingly resistant to antibiotics were genetically linked to antibiotic-resistant bacteria on supermarket meat.

But as the documentary probed, scientists’ research was complicated by a lack of data on how antibiotics were being used on farms.

“I was surprised to find out that farmers aren’t required to report how many antibiotics they’re using, or for what purpose,” Hoffman said in 2014. In the documentary, he explored the regulatory landscape around antibiotics in animal agriculture at the time — and went inside a failed attempt by the Food and Drug Administration to restrict the use of farm antibiotics nearly 40 years prior.

The Trouble with Antibiotics, produced by Rick Young and Anthony Szulc, is the latest documentary from FRONTLINE’s extensive archives to be released on the series’ YouTube channel. You can also watch it in the PBS App and in FRONTLINE’s online collection of more than 300 streaming documentaries. Plus, explore some of what’s changed since the documentary aired, and watch related investigations.