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Use of 8m pounds of antibiotics and antifungals a year leads to superbugs and damages human health, lawsuit claims A new legal petition filed by a dozen public health and farm worker groups demands the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stop allowing farms to spray antibiotics on food crops in the US because they are probably causing superbugs to flourish and sickening farm workers. This kind of recklessness and preventable suffering is what happens when the industry has a stranglehold on the EPA's pesticide-approval process." Antibiotic-resistant infections sicken about 2.8 million people and cause about 35,000 deaths, annually, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, estimates. "The use of antibiotics as pesticides has the potential to select for antimicrobial resistant bacteria present in the environment," the agency wrote. "The bottom line is the massive problems created by spraying human medicine on food crops far outweighs the agricultural problems." Donley said there are simple crop management steps that should be tried first, like planting crops further apart, breeding more disease-resistant varieties of crops and identifying diseased trees and quickly removing them to prevent the diseases from spreading."