Monday January 8 4:13 PM ET Drug Use in Animals Seen Higher Than Thought By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Farm animals get eight times as many antibiotics as people do in the United States, and this may be fueling the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, an environmental group said on Monday. About 70 percent of all antibiotics made in the United States go to fattening up livestock, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) said. ``The meat industry's share of the antibiotic resistance problem has been ignored for too long,'' Margaret Mellon, who helped write the report for the group, told a news conference. The use of antibiotics in farm animals is controversial. Farmers routinely feed them to livestock because flocks and herds tend to grow faster when they get them. But scientists, doctors and government officials fear this widespread use is contributing to the rise of antibiotic-resistant ``superbugs.'' The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (news - web sites) (FDA) recently moved against some uses of certain drugs in the fluoroquinolone class in poultry. Despite the debate, the UCS said, more antibiotics are being used in animals than ever. It said 16 million pounds were used in the mid-1980s and 25 million pounds are used now. Mellon urged the FDA to force companies to provide better usage data and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to get a better estimate of amounts used in livestock. ``We are worried about people ... going to a doctor with a disease, expecting to get an antibiotic to treat it and finding that there is no such antibiotic,'' Mellon said. Wide Use Leads To Superbug Mutations Wide use of antibiotics leads to the development of stronger bugs for a simple reason