Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

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That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

This is Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today, the topic is antibiotic use and overuse for animals. Dr. David

Wollinga, senior health official at the National Resources Defense Council, talks to Dr. Josh

Sharfstein about efforts to reduce unnecessary antibiotic use on farms around the world. Let's listen.

Dr. David Wollinga, thank you so much for joining me on Public Health on call.

We're going to talk about the use and overuse of antibiotics.

I'm happy to be here.

So talk to me about antibiotics. I know you spend a lot of time thinking about them.

Why should we be concerned about the overuse of antibiotics?

Yeah. Well, I'll say the first thing, which is obvious, is that antibiotics have become

absolutely essential for a lot of what we see as sort of the miracle of modern medicine.

You have a major procedure like a surgery or even a C-section. You get cancer and go on chemotherapy. You have a major procedure like a surgery or even a C-section.

You get cancer and go on chemotherapy.

You diabetic and you need to go on dialysis.

All these things are things that are complicated by bacterial infections pretty commonly.

So like it's hard to do those life-saving procedures if you can't count on antibiotics to work, if you get an infection. That's why we all want to do those life-saving procedures if you can't count on antibiotics to work if you get an infection.

That's why we all want antibiotics that work.

The problem is that the more we use antibiotics, for whatever reason, the more we select for

...