This happened very quickly! Good. Note, though, that nothing is being said about continuing to crowd more and more animals together. That's the other dangerous side of modern "farming" practices: if a disease develops a resistance to one of these other antibiotics, it could still destroy our food supply.
Tyson still will use a class of antibiotics called ionophores that are not used to treat humans. If bacteria develop resistance to ionophores, doctors don't care, because they never use ionophores anyway.
Smith pointed out that Tyson is not promising to never ever use a human antibiotic. "What we're saying is, we don't believe that we're going to need to. But we're not going to let chickens suffer," he says.
If the company does resort to using a human antibiotic, though, it will report that use publicly, Smith says.
According to Smith, Tyson already has reduced its use of human-use antibiotics by 80 percent over the past four years. More than 90 percent of its chickens, in fact, now do not receive any human-use antibiotics at any point in their lives.