Sure, people share their dinners with their dogs, and some share their beds, but that kind of closeness generally isn’t as much of a major danger to human health as this new kind of closeness uncovered by unsuspecting scientists. There is now scientific evidence that some people may be sharing their pets’ medications.
The major source of these rogue antibiotics was not people’s pets; that information was volunteered by just 4% of those surveyed. The rest came from more predictable sources: Twenty percent got them from well-meaning friends or family, 12% said they squirreled them away from the last time they were sick, and 24% said they bought them in another country.
Study co-author Dr. Barbara Trautner was not as surprised. Though the survey hadn’t included the option, she said she has been questioned closely by her pharmacist when frequently picking up an antibiotic prescription for her daughter’s pet frogs, Brooke and Tiny Bubbles. Frogs are susceptible to a condition called red leg, a kind of gangrene that can be cleared up with an antibiotic, she explained.
The study ran in the recent edition of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy. Of the 400 demographically diverse adults surveyed, far too many people shared that they used antibiotics without a doctor’s supervision, according to the co-authors, who are doctors in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine.
In fact, taking your pet’s antibiotics or using antibiotics without a prescription can be a big threat to human health. Studies have showed that communities of people who often take antibiotics without a prescription tend to have more problems with antibiotic resistance.
A Texas death row inmate is challenging the substitution of pentobarbital for the more traditional sodium thiopental as the initial, anesthetizing drug in his three-drug execution cocktail. The state’s supply of sodium thiopental expired in March, and there is a worldwide shortage of the chemical agent. Pentobarbital, the proposed replacement, is commonly used in animal euthanasia. Do doctors and veterinarians use a lot of the same medications?
Absolutely. Dogs, cats, horses, and sheep regularly take the same medicines as wounded bipedals. Many, and perhaps most, antibiotics are approved for use in humans and animals. Versions of some of our anti-anxiety medications and painkillers are approved for other species as well. But just because the active ingredient is the same in human and animal formulations doesn’t mean the pills are identical—there’s often a difference in dosage, and the inactive ingredients may differ (in kind and amount) as well. So the state of Texas won’t buy its pentobarbital from the animal hospital, even though there is a super-concentrated veterinary dose specially formulated for euthanasia. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement
So how dangerous is it for a human to take animal medicine? The official answer is that you shouldn’t take animal drugs. Even if you could accurately diagnose yourself, figure out the appropriate dose, and adroitly cut the horse pills down to the right size, it’s hard to tell whether the amount and type of inactive ingredients in any particular drug are safe for people. Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement
In other cases, large companies working in both the medical and veterinary fields develop the two formulations side by side. The approval processes for human and animal drugs are entirely separate, although similar. Just like ordinary medicines, veterinary drugs have to clear randomized, blinded, placebo-controlled trials. Animal trials, however, often contain about one-tenth as many patients. (On occasion, pharmaceutical companies don’t bother with the animal approval process, because there isn’t much of a market for veterinary cancer drugs, for example. Vets have to prescribe those medicines off-label.) Advertisement Advertisement
Many animal drugs start off as human medications, because there is far more money invested in human drug research. In such cases, manufacturers sometimes reformulate their drugs for sale to animal owners. For example, if the dose for dogs is less than for humans, they may have to add more binding agent to bulk the pill up to a manageable size. (The active ingredient constitutes a minuscule fraction of the overall volume of any pills.) The company might also put more or less of a chemical that aids in absorption.