Medicine: Drugged Chicks Hatch a Menace

More than 19 million lbs. of antibiotics are fed to cattle, pigs and chickens each year as they amble toward the dinner table. At the same time, doctors treating meat-eating humans have seen a steady and alarming increase in infections resistant to these same antibiotics. Is there a link? Scientists and consumer activists long suspected that there was but were never able to prove it.

Now they can. In the first study to connect antibiotic resistance in humans directly with the food we eat, a group of Minnesota public health specialists reported in last week's New England Journal of Medicine that...