Just to be clear, a little googling around about the drugs in question seems to indicate major use of Ceftriaxone (the front line antibiotic for gonorrhea) and its analogues in factory farming.

Reuters: Special Report: Powerful antibiotic for cows often misused by farmers: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-farmaceuticals-ceftiofur-specialrepor/special-report-powerful-antibiotic-for-cows-often-misused-by-farmers-idUSKCN0JJ03T20141205

Zoetis says ceftiofur is safe to use as directed. “The use of ceftiofur continues to be appropriate when used according to the label directions in those animals that are in at-risk situations,” said Scott Brown, vice president of global therapeutics research at Zoetis.

The stakes are especially high because the drug is part of a crucial class of antibiotics called cephalosporins. The class includes ceftriaxone, a drug that’s vital to treating pneumonia, meningitis and salmonella infections in children, according to the FDA. The use of one type of cephalosporin can compromise the effectiveness of others in the same class.

“There is a very clear link between ceftiofur use and ceftriaxone resistance,” said Paul Fey, a professor of microbiology at University of Nebraska Medical Center. “We know that ceftiofur-resistant salmonella are clearly ceftriaxone-resistant.”

So what’s really distressing here to me is that this likely isn’t even from human overuse, and this affects diseases other than just gonorrhea.

Antibiotic use in pig farming and its associated factors in L County in Yunnan, China: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8025606/

Personal Note: This is not meant to single out China for anything, antibiotic use is out of control for farmers all over the planet. This was just one of the first results that came up for “ceftriaxone farming.”

The use of 20 antibiotics was reported, with oxytetracycline, penicillin, amoxicillin, cefoperazone, norfloxacin, ceftriaxone, ofloxacin, cefradine, chloramphenicol and sulfadiazine ranking in the top 10 as reported by 213 (52.7%), 182 (45.1%), 156 (38.6%), 82 (20.3%), 78 (19.3%), 75 (18.6%), 73 (18.1%), 64 (15.8%), 40 (9.9%) and 39 (9.6%) of the 404 surveyed farmers, respectively (Table 13). These antibiotics were the most commonly used ones by the surveyed farmers in pig rearing. The other 10 antibiotics used are also presented in Table 13. We sorted the 20 antibiotics into nine different classes based on their chemical structures. Table 14 presents the nine classes of antibiotics with the class of penicillin ranking the first (mentioned by 338 farmers), followed by tetracyclines (mentioned by 223 farmers).

It’s really distressing how factory farming is making a huge impact on the ability of antibiotics to continue to be effective.