Letter Re: Veterinary Antibiotics
Jim: As an emergency room physician in rural East Tennessee and SW Virginia, I’ve seen a number of “casualties” from human use of animal antibiotics. First, the binders used in vet meds are not tested, usually, for lack of general reactivity in humans; if your genetic haplotypes are extremely different from cows and pigs, you might have an allergic reaction to the binder, not the antibiotic; I’ve seen this happen three times, once to bovine antibiotics, and twice to pig meds. Solution: test a small amount of the agent (e.g. 1/8th of a tab) and if no reaction in 24 …