Most people know that bacteria from uncooked chicken can cause a nasty case of food poisoning.
What many don't know is that antibiotics are losing their effectiveness against such illnesses. Bacteria have developed increasing resistance to fluoroquinolones, the antibiotics often used to treat severe gastrointestinal infections. Part of the problem is the unnecessary overuse of these drugs on farm animals. When poultry farmers started routinely feeding these human antibiotics to chickens and turkeys in 1995, an estimated one percent of the people treated with fluoroquinolones had illnesses resistant to the treatment. But by 1999, that figure had risen to nearly 18 percent, affecting an estimated 11,000 Americans.