People aren't the problem; it's the food industry that abuses antibiotics the most. When a pig gets ill, it's way cheaper to give her a dose of antibiotics instead of getting a vet.
Antibiotics are sometimes given to sick animals, but their main use is as growth promoters [1]. Animals that are regularly fed low doses of antibiotics grow faster, meaning that they can be slaughtered earlier and the overall cost of rearing the animal is therefore reduced.
"The effectiveness of synercid, a drug of last resort for the treatment of vancomycin-resistant infections, is threatened because of the use of virginiamycin as a growth promoter in chickens and pigs in the United States. Virginiamycin is chemically related to synercid, and bacteria resistant to the one drug also appear to be resistant to the other." [2]
Many people will point out that the antibiotics given to animals are mostly different from those used on humans. However, as your example points out there are actually only a small number of families of antibiotics each of which share a specific method of attack on bacteria. And bacteria that become resistant to a cheap antibiotic, like virginiamycin, will do so in a way that also renders them resistant to their more expensive cousins that have been reserved for human use.
You just (unintentionally) said that capitalism is the problem.
If people were willing to pay for antibiotic-free meat, then farmers would produce it. They would call the vet, and maybe destroy the pig rather than treat it with antibiotics.
By the way, you're naively presuming they're using antibiotics when the pig gets sick. Nope, they're using them prophylactically.
> You just (unintentionally) said that capitalism is the problem.
That's a strawman fallacy [1].
> If people were willing to pay for antibiotic-free meat, then farmers would produce it.
Seeing as most farming in the United States is done on megafarms owned by large corporations [2] that have historically shown to be (to put it mildly) lax on their focus on serving healthy and nutritious products to their customers [3], and that "farmers" in the traditional colloquial sense are now only 2% of the population [4], you'll hopefully understand if I say that your statement has little relevance in the United States in 2013.
