The abuse of antibiotics is a serious situation. Antibiotics are considered to be one of the greatest inventions in medicine in the 20th century. Due to the widespread promotion and use of antibiotics, plague, tuberculosis, dysentery and other infectious diseases in history have been controlled. During World War II, penicillin alone kept thousands of soldiers threatened with death.
 
China is a big country in antibiotic use and production. It is estimated that my country produces about 210,000 tons of antibiotic raw materials every year, exports 30,000 tons, and the rest is used for personal use (including medical and agricultural use), and the per capita annual consumption is about 138 grams (only 13 grams in the United States).

 
According to the national bacterial resistance monitoring results of the Ministry of Health from 2006 to 2007, the annual utilization rate of antibiotics in hospitals across the country was as high as 74%. In developed countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, the antibiotic usage rate in hospitals is only 22% to 25%, while the usage rate of antibiotics among hospitalized patients in China is as high as 70%, and almost all surgical patients use antibiotics, with a rate as high as 97%. According to the disease classification survey from 1995 to 2007, infectious diseases accounted for 49% of the total incidence of all diseases in China, of which bacterial infections accounted for 18% to 21% of all diseases, and more than 80% belonged to the abuse of antibiotics.
 
The breeding industry is also the hardest hit by the abuse of antibiotics. According to media reports, half of my country's antibiotics are used clinically and half are used in animal husbandry. Experts estimate that of the 210,000 tons of antibiotic raw materials produced in China every year, 97,000 tons are used in animal husbandry, accounting for 46.1% of the total annual output. Since the discovery in the 1950s that low concentrations of antibiotics in feeds can not only prevent animal diseases but also promote the growth of livestock and poultry, various antibiotics have been widely added to feeds.
 
In order to control the residues of antibiotics in animals, many antibiotics can only be used in specific animal stages with a certain period of withdrawal. For example, it is strictly forbidden to use olaquindox in poultry and pig feeds of more than 35 kg; sulfonamides, aminoglycosides, macrocyclopropyl esters and other drugs are required to have a withdrawal period of more than one week before animal products are marketed; oxytetracycline and furazolidone require discontinuation five days before slaughter.